An emerging research experiment built around overlapping roles, shared knowledge and relationships that don’t fit neatly into boxes.

This fall, we are experimenting with a research methodology we are affectionately calling Scrambled Research.

The idea grew out of discussions on practice rather than from a theory we decided to apply first. Our projects often cross boundaries that research and arts institutions normally like to keep separate. A student could also be a researcher. A community organization could become a research partner, employer, funder or lead. An artist could be doing the research rather than simply making something about it afterward. Academic researchers could move into community settings, while questions emerging from those communities could travel back into universities and other institutions.

Eventually, we started wondering whether we were actually doing something here. If research keeps spilling across institutional boundaries anyway, what happens if we stop trying to tidy it up?

That is the experiment behind Scrambled Research. And yes, it’s a lot like scrambled eggs because we started thinking about it over breakfast.

The approach builds on ideas we already know from years of supporting all sorts of arts-based and participatory action research, community-based participatory research, community-engaged research, transdisciplinary research, distributed research and knowledge co-production. What we are interested in adding is a closer look at the machinery surrounding research: who leads, who decides, who gets funded, who employs people, who supervises the work, whose knowledge carries authority and how those relationships change from one project to another.

In a conventional research environment, those roles often come with fairly predictable labels. Student. Researcher. Principal investigator. Community partner. Funder. Institution. The problem is that real projects almost never behave so neatly. A person might be a student at a university while leading research through a community organization. A nonprofit might commission a researcher while also contributing its own knowledge. An artist might bring a method that changes the research question itself.

We are interested in what happens when those overlaps are treated as a feature rather than a problem.

This doesn’t mean abandoning structure. We still need clear agreements about ethics, budgets, supervision, employment, governance and responsibility. We want to see this kind of experiment happening at another level: the larger network of relationships connecting all of those things. Rather than assuming that research authority always has to follow academic rank or institutional position, we wantto ask if it can follow the knowledge, responsibility and circumstances of the work itself.

That changes the direction knowledge can travel. A research question might begin with a community and move into a university. A student might bring something substantial to a research project rather than simply learning from it. An academic researcher might contribute expertise to work led somewhere else. An artistic process might uncover a question that wasn’t visible through conventional research methods.

Funding gets interesting too. Research money doesn’t always have to follow the same old route from institution to researcher to community. A community organization can commission research. Different organizations can support different pieces of a larger program. Public funding can build capacity outside the university. The way money moves can shape the research environment just as much as the way knowledge moves through it.

We are also interested in what happens when research has a longer memory than a grant.

People move on. Students graduate. Researchers change jobs. Projects end. But relationships, methods, questions, datasets, creative work and lessons learned can remain with a community or organization and become useful to whoever comes next. Instead of rebuilding a program every time someone new arrives, a network can accumulate experience.

That matters for the kind of long-term questions we are interested in. Environmental change, community development, cultural memory, technology and regional transformation don’t conveniently wrap themselves up when a funding period ends. They keep going. Research needs ways of keeping up.

Art is part of that process for us, not decoration at the end of it.

We can map the network, visualize relationships, trace how funding and knowledge move, turn institutional structures into visual material or use creative practice to make something that is otherwise difficult to see. The organization of research becomes something we can actually look at, play with and question.

And we are not outside that system while doing it. Our own roles, partnerships, organizations, funding relationships and institutional movements are part of the experiment. They influence what we can do and what we are able to see. In that sense, a research network is both the thing we are working within and one of the things we are studying.

We don’t have a finished blueprint for our Scrambled Research, and that’s intentional. This fall is about starting to explore it. We want to see what holds up, what breaks, what becomes possible and what turns out to be more complicated than expected.

The goal isn’t to replace conventional research or declare that every project should be organized this way. What we really want to do is make room other possibilities: research can have clear responsibilities without having a single centre; institutions can collaborate without everyone being reduced to a fixed role; and communities can contribute knowledge without being treated simply as research subjects.

Maybe the best way to describe it is this: we are taking apart the research systems we’re used, moving some of the pieces around and seeing what happens when we put them back together differently. And we’re going to be making it fun. Why? Because if it’s not fun, it’s often not worth doing.

And that’s why we like to call it “Scrambled Research.”