How We Work

Critical Realism and Explanation

Critical realism supports MAPS Lab's focus on moving from description to explanation. We use observed experiences and patterns as starting points for asking what structures, mechanisms, relationships, and conditions could be generating them.

Critical Methodological Pluralism

Methods are chosen according to the question and the explanatory work they can do. MAPS research may combine population-level or administrative data with qualitative, participatory, community-based, ethnographic, mapping, evidence-synthesis, and public-scholarship approaches.

Participatory and Community-engaged Research

People with lived and living experience can contribute as co-researchers, collaborators, interpreters, advisors, knowledge holders, and research leaders. Participation is designed around meaningful roles, power-sharing, accessibility, reciprocity, and clear recognition of contributions.

Intersectional and Equity-centred Analysis

MAPS examines how social positions, institutional arrangements, resources, and structural conditions combine to create different experiences and outcomes. Quantitative and qualitative work are both used to investigate these patterns.

Disability Justice and Accessibility

Mental health-related disability is studied in relation to environmental demands, functional capacities, participation, social conditions, and the distribution of resources and possibilities. Accessibility is also treated as a requirement for the Lab's own research and communication practices.

Anti-oppressive and Relational Research Practice

MAPS pays attention to the organization of research itself: power, decision-making, authorship, compensation, inclusion, access, accountability, and ethics-in-practice.

Knowledge Reciprocity and Social Movements

MAPS is developing an audience- and relationship-centred approach to how research knowledge moves. We ask who can use the knowledge, what they care about, who they trust, which channels already exist, what change is desired, and how we can learn whether knowledge was noticed, shared, adapted, or used.