UnBox / JUPITA
A tangible toolkit and special-interest community for early-career researchers working on Justice, Power and Transformative Action in Sustainability.
Context
Early-career researchers across sustainability disciplines often face the same blind spots: how to make collaborative research processes legible to peers, supervisors and partners; how to interrogate hidden assumptions about justice and power; how to share what has been learned in formats that can be reused.
JUPITA emerged as a transdisciplinary community to address exactly these questions, and UnBox is its flagship tangible artefact.
Methods
- Co-design sessions across multiple universities and contexts.
- Iterative prototyping of physical, game-like components representing collaborative research stages.
- Workshop testing with doctoral cohorts and early-career networks.
- Reflective writing pulled together as the JUPITA manifesto.
Outputs
- UnBox toolkit — a physical kit that surfaces metaphors, roles and frictions inside a collaborative research project.
- JUPITA Zine (2024) — a public-engagement publication.
- Collaborative Research Manifesto, published in International Journal of Social Research Methodology (Barker, Pervez, Wahome, et al., 2023).
Evidence & impact
- Peer-reviewed publication in a leading social-research methods journal.
- Tested and presented with doctoral and transdisciplinary research communities.
- An ongoing community of practice spanning UK, EU and Global South partners.
Relevance
This work demonstrates how research-impact infrastructure can itself be co-produced — and how playful, tangible artefacts can shift institutional conversations about justice and power in sustainability research.