Collective Consent

Deondre Smiles and Sophia Jaworski

In the CLEAR Lab, led by Dr. Max Liboiron (Red River Métis), lab members use “collective consent” as a process-based technique within our weekly meetings. Collectivity is one of CLEAR’s core values. Collectivity has to do with how we “approach our interactions with others, including how we stand with others on their own terms, and how we refuse certain types of relations” (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 6). By consent, we mean a shared consensus, where “the aim of consensus is to redistribute power and advocacy” (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 15).

CLEAR meets weekly, which allows lab members to come together regularly to check-in, talk, and learn. While CLEAR has a collective consent protocol for when an outside researcher wants to use CLEAR as a study site, in this glossary entry we focus on our experiences as lab members participating in collective consent processes within lab meetings. One big reason processes of collective consent within the lab are so important is that they also ground the ethics and types of good relations we privilege across CLEAR research and with the communities that CLEAR is a part of. Lab meetings are a space where we renew these commitments to each other and to our relations.

We would like to talk about several collective consent techniques that are particularly useful during lab meetings: temperature checks, weatherball, and round robins. These are all iterative practices, meaning that they change and adapt as we go along, or that how members of the group respond can “change what we were planning on doing in the lab based on what the check in tells us” (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 11).

Each one also helps hone our skills with facilitation, as well as navigating collectivity as a semipermeable membrane:

“We are a living, cooperating system that stays healthy by letting some things flow through, keeping other things out, and actively seeking out others. These activities make conditions inside the living system different from the conditions outside of it. This does not mean we always agree with each other, but rather we aim to move through difference and disagreement while holding each other accountable, calling in to shared relations rather than calling out into ostracization” (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 19).

During temperature checks, members are asked to change the position of their hands in relation to their level of agreement or understanding. For example, someone might ask, “Do we like this idea? Let’s do a temperature check.” Then, lab members all hold up their hands at once and wiggle their fingers. If hands are facing upwards, it indicates consent. If hands are wiggling to the side, it indicates someone needs more dialogue. If hands are wiggling downwards, it indicates non-consent, or refusal (see CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 15 on refusal). Members who wiggled to the side or downwards are given the chance to speak, and the process continues until consent is reached.

During weatherball, lab members take turns sharing what types of weather they feel like that day. This almost always includes vivid and eloquent descriptions such as ‘early morning frost,’ a ‘sun dog,’ or a ‘storm gathering on the sea with a growing brightness behind.’ While describing ourselves as weather may not seem like an obvious form of collective consent, it allows everyone present to be collectively seen and witnessed for where they are at during a given day. It is also a way of implicitly consenting at the beginning of meetings to hold space for, and show up for, everyone who is present. Weatherball centers feelings, reflexivity, and a reflection on our own individualism in relation to the collective, which sets us up for being present to our shared commitments as a community of people.

During round robins, “junior researchers, introverts, women, people of colour, new recruits, and others that may not otherwise speak have a structured chance to share their insights” (CLEAR Lab Book 2021, pg. 51). Round robins give every person a chance to share and contribute their perspectives, or choose to pass it on to the next person.

Doing the above three things regularly cultivates a sense of updating consent iteratively, as people’s minds change as we talk with one another.

Overall, engaging in collective consent regularly during weekly lab meetings is important because it:

1. orients our accountabilities in a mindful way, as consent can change depending on if we are practicing good relations,
2. supports the use of “guidelines for safer collective conversations” and other types of consensus-based decision making (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 50),
3. and grounds the shared work we do in the lab so that it centers infrastructural theories of change (CLEAR Lab Book pg. 8 Note 4, see also Tuck and Yang 2012) guided by the CLEAR values of humility, accountability, and collectivity.

We had a conversation with Max where we consider how collective consent differs from “collective caring.” Max reminded us that this distinction is important to think about because “care” can carry colonial baggage with it by being universalizing. In their view, it might end up being a source of well-intentioned violence, which whitewashes how the affects and values connected to normalized understandings of care non-innocently reproduce wider structures of power, especially in spaces adjacent to, or working within and against, white supremacist institutions (Murphy 2015). Sophia then reflected on how an abstract value of care can reproduce the values of a saviour complex grounded in individualism, something she’s been steeped in for much of her time in academic spaces (see Yanchapaxi et al. 2022). Collective consent, in contrast, is an always changing process grounded in relation that recognizes different forms of privilege and positionality we all bring to the lab, and allows room to step up or step back (CLEAR Lab Book 2021 pg. 15).

Dr. Deondre Smiles is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is of Ojibwe, Black, and Swedish descent and is a proud citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe. Dr. Smiles’s interests are many and include Indigenous geographies, human-environment interactions, and Indigenous cultural resource management and preservation. He serves as the principal investigator for the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, one of Western Canada’s first Indigenous geographies-focused labs.

Sophia Jaworski (she/her) is a settler on Dish With One Spoon Territory and is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A proud member of CLEAR from January 2022-April 2023, Sophia’s interests include collaborative and visual methods, and how they might co-produce feminist, anti-racist and anti-colonial knowledge about petrochemicals geared towards environmental data justice.