By Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden
In Part 2 of our ‘Building a Lab’ series, our director Victoria explains how we’re establishing ourselves as a research team, moving beyond our objectives and outcomes to focus on the values that inform who we are, how we work, and how we’ll go about achieving them.
It is not very often, in academia, that you get the opportunity to ‘start from scratch’. The launch of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab this year, however, has allowed us to break the mould.
Building a new team from the ground up means we’ve had the chance to start by thinking about who we are as a team and what values we want to underpin our work over the next five years –in terms of how we work together and with others, and our outputs.
The mission statement of the Lab was set in our project proposal: to ensure the Holocaust sector is better equipped for the digital age. Our work now was to inform this ambitious goal with core values and a clear vision.
Over the first few weeks, I led an intensive induction programme for the Lab’s new team to bring us all together and ensure everyone played a role in defining these.
The first important question for us was to establish ‘where are we?’ Whilst we are a unique, international research Lab, we are still fundamentally a part of the University of Sussex – so there’s no point reinventing the wheel entirely when considering our identity. The values across the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities, the globally respected Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies, and the wider university community speak to our ethos.
For example, the faculty’s building blocks of creativity, critical thinking, scientific rigour, and a desire to be curiosity-driven are also the key elements that drive us. And the tenets of the wider university’s strategy reflect our focus on digital and data futures, human flourishing, and environmental sustainability.
However, when it came to defining our values in terms of our aims, we wanted to think more broadly about positioning the Lab within wider research and heritage cultures. Essentially, what are we trying to achieve for the people we are trying to serve?
We’ve agreed to produce a set of concrete outputs, and we’ve already started work on their design. From the outset, I was sure that everything we create must be informed by these four tenets:
- cultivating the production of new knowledge
- leading change in the global heritage sector
- committing to open access and organic knowledge exchange
- diversifying our offerings to reach the widest global audience
From this starting point, we got round the table and refined our 10 key values, brainstorming what we felt was important to each of us personally, to the university’s identity, to the groups we wanted to most feel the impact of our work, and to the project’s agreed objectives.
And this is what we came up with:
| Our Values Think Big: Be global (diversity our outputs to reach the widest audience), be innovative, be new, trail-blazing but do not be innovative for the sake of (newness should always be informed by rigour). Future-facing: focus on cutting-edge technologies, those not out yet, and speculative futures. Be agile and adaptive – respond to digital and cultural change and evolve with it. Be vigilant to technological and socio-political developments. Rigorous: our work and practices must be nuanced, conscious and critical. Strategic: decisions should be deliberate, informed by intention and conviction, focused on the project’s objectives, and driven by impact. Sustainable: do not be wasteful – ensure outputs have long-lasting potential designed into them, and always consider environmental impact. Inclusive: compassion, empathy, sensitivity, accessibility, fairness and transparency will be at the heart of our working practices and outputs. Curious: direct our attention to the ‘in-between’ – where are the gaps and cracks that are overlooked? What are other ways of telling stories that have not yet been told? Be curiosity-led. Collaborative: transdisciplinary, cross-sector thinking is at the heart of our activities. We value disagreement, community and listening. Equitable: we give equal weight to expertise in the team, we have respect for expertise inside and outside of it. Cohesion and communication ensure everyone is valued. Accountable: Respect comes with responsibility. We hold ourselves to account as individuals, and each other and those working with us and across the sector. |
To take our values to the next stage we zoomed out beyond our institution to remind ourselves about the significance of impact to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (how research is assessed). We needed to summarise a clear vision to make visible how we intend to change the world with research (externally) whilst capturing how we intend to work together(internally).
Through our team workshops we agreed our vision:
We see a future in which global Holocaust memory and education is shaped by fitting digital strategies, informed by digital literacies, and supported by appropriate digital capacities.
Our vision is to shape this future by creating a community informed by transdisciplinary exchange, rigorous research, and an inclusive, global outlook.
We will achieve this by being vigilant to social, political and technological change; critically innovative rather than being led simply by the latest trends; and by embracing nuance, collaboration and dissensus rather than always seeking easy answers and consensus.
We are led by curiosity and the areas lesser explored, and our working practices as well as our outputs are shaped by listening, cultural sensitivity, respect, taking responsibility, and making decisions that are deliberate and lead to sustainable outcomes that best serve the future of the Holocaust memory and education sector.
To imagine a more sustainable future for digital Holocaust memory and education, we needed to start by defining strong visions and values for the present. These will now serve as a springboard for our ongoing work.
Join us in our first large, international collaborative meet-up, where listening, community and transdisciplinary exchange will be central. Check out our call for contributors to our 2025 Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo.
The Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launches this Autumn. Contact us for details.