Louisiana Contextual Science Research Group (LCSRG)

A message from Emily Sandoz, Ph.D., LCSRG Director:

The Lab, Louisiana Contextual Science Research Group, is nearly 14 years old. But the Lab as it is today is a more recent development. See, the COVID pandemic changed just about everything I thought I knew about myself, the world, and my place in it. And my understanding of scientific structures and activities was not spared. I remember telling people, as we struggled to make sense of what was happening, “Nothing will ever be the same.” And of course, I couldn’t have known what this meant about what would come next.

What this ended up meaning, for my labbies and me, was a shocking clarity around both the incredible fragility of the lives we had built and the remarkable inequities that characterized those lives. Suddenly, aiming to do meaningful work was not just a way to leverage motivation or prevent burnout. With disease and civil unrest shaking the foundations of communities across the world, doing meaningful work was the only way that it made sense to keep working at all. And as we found ways to come together centering meaning and the work it inspired, we were faced with hard truths about the differences in the resources we had to enjoy and to offer. For my team of local and remote researchers and practitioners, the pandemic threw into painful relief the ways we had been moving through our shared activities as if we were all playing the same game, with the same challenges, the same rules, and the same prizes to be won. 

And so, we changed things. Taking advantage of the necessity to meet online, we opened the lab up to anyone interested in collaborating, regardless of their residency or background. Considering the substantial and diverse needs of our team, we eliminated the minimum weekly hours requirements for lab involvement. Watching the foundations of so many aspects of society that we had come to rely on crack and crumble, we shifted our model for mutual support, taking time each meeting to explicitly name the needs each project and person came with, the resources we each had to allocate to those needs, and the opportunities we had to share. We decided, as a team, to set aside competition and shift contingencies toward cooperating to support the growth every human who found a home inside this co-created space we call The Lab.  

And I was so surprised and inspired by what came next. 

Indeed, my lab not only survived the pandemic, but thrived. In the past four years, we have welcomed new researchers from a range of professional and personal backgrounds, who have not only supported a burst of productivity and creativity, but also pushed our work to new domains. In the past four years, our lab has come to be known for the development of theoretically sound and explicitly actionable analyses of tough concepts with massive social implications. In addition to our regular empirical work, we have published papers on privilege, affirmative sexual consent, valued living in academia, and intimacy across power and privilege. We have also presented papers now in development for publication on compassion and gender. 

My first decade as a Psychology professor taught me to love the inherent and perpetual growth that characterizes academia. These last four years taught me to trust and to nurture that growth, letting the Labbies that I serve grow me into what it is that they need. 

And I am delighted to live what comes next. 

If you are curious about co-creating a nurturing space for contextual science and science-based intervention to grow under my mentorship, we’ve got tons of stuff on this site to offer to resource that curiosity. See how it lands for you. And if you like it, reach out. 

-Em

We're so glad you're here, and we're looking forward to being a part of your journey. Browse the links and information below to navigate through the various pages on our website to see what we're all about and how to become a part of it.