Research Justice, a term coined by the now defunct DataCenter in Oakland, CA, is a response to the extractive violence that both academic and popular research has perpetuated. Research Justice shifts decision-making power over all aspects of research – from research questions, methodologies and design, implementation and data collection, to publication and dissemination – from the researcher and funders to the people most impacted by the research. This decision-making power must also include the ability for impacted communities to refuse research that does not meet the needs of social justice and decolonial ethics.

Research, in its traditional form, is the very process through which domination and violence are justified and carried out via producing knowledge that legitimizes the accumulation of power through investigation. Rarely has traditional research sought to analyze colonial and oppressive power systems in favor of extracting information from the victims of those systems. Increasingly, neoliberalism has influenced this process toward an ever-growing socialization that knowledge should be individualized and privatized, fashioned into a commodity that one can own and lay personal claim to.

However, historical storytelling, literary analysis, and other forms of humanities research based on practices of Research Justice is a move towards addressing the need for ongoing resistance and providing tools for healing from previous and ongoing forms of violence. It is not a linear process, but rather an imaginative future-oriented practice that also engages and attends to the past and present in deep and transformative ways. It is a radical rejection of the instrumentalizing of knowledge and stories to extract, oppress, alienate, and commodify.

The Regeneración Lab works through a research justice framework to develop projects. We also provide consultation and support for justice-centered and decolonial research projects.

Related Publications

• Salomón J, Amrah. TedX Talk: Ancestral-Led Research Justice https://youtu.be/MTmL9KMKBxo?feature=shared
• Salomón J, Amrah. “Telling to reclaim, not to sell: Resistance narratives and the marketing of justice.” Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change. UK, Policy Press (2025).
• Salomón J, Amrah. “Drawing on the Difuentes.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 53, no. 1 (2023): 91-93.
• Brito-Millán, Marlene, Leonardo Figueroa Helland, Janin Guzman Morales, Emma Harrison, Jessica Ng, Leslie Quintanilla, Amrah Salomón, and B.T. Werner. “Rejecting Green Colonial Solutions: Towards Decolonial Solidarity with Mother Earth’s Revolt.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 21, no. 5-6 (2023): 338-359.
• Salomón J, Amrah. Carbon Copies: colonial recognition, extractive development, and Indigenous citizenship.” Making Citizenship Work: Culture and community. Ed. Rodolfo Rosales. Routledge. Print. 2022.
• Salomón J, Amrah. “New Gold Rush, Same Genocide.” Water Justice + Technology: The COVID-19 Crisis, Computational Resource Control, and Water “Relief” Policy, ed. Theodora Dryer. AI Now Institute at New York University. 10 January 2022.
• M. Belmonte, E. Harrison, J. Guzman-Morales, M. Brito-Millán, J. Ng, A. Salomón, and L. Quintanilla. “A Challenge to Green New Deal Activists: We need to reject “sustainable” technologies that reproduce colonial gold rush devastation on Indigenous Peoples.” Water Justice + Technology: The COVID-19 Crisis, Computational Resource Control, and Water “Relief” Policy, ed. Theodora Dryer. AI Now Institute at New York University. 10 January 2022.
• M. Brito-Millán, A. Cheng, E. Harrison, M. Mendoza Martinez, A. Salomón, R. Sugla, M. Belmonte, L. Quintanilla, J. Guzman-Morales, and A. Martinez. “No Comemos Baterías: Solidarity Science Against False Climate Change Solutions.” Science for the People. The Return of Radical Science. Spring 2019.