Dismantling the Master's Tools is a toolkit that can guide users through a brave and critical exploration of their identities, narratives, and practices as researchers. A researcher is anyone who participates in an ongoing process of inquiry in order to arrive at deeper, more clarified understandings of whatever it is they are investigating, in order to be of better service to it (i.e. by this definition, most of us are researchers!)

The toolkit is designed to prompt and hold difficult and perhaps uncomfortable conversations with oneself (and possibly with each other), while being mindful of individual boundaries around safety. It includes:

• Invitations to researchers to explore their own lineage (who/what/where they come from) the stories they hold (about themselves, the people they are engaging, research, and the world at large), and how these beliefs impact their approach to research.
• Lectures that unpack the ways in which persisting beliefs and “best practices” within social R&D can and do contribute to harm in the name of research.
• Reflection questions that prompt researchers to critically examine their relationship to, and embodiment of, these beliefs and practices.
• Activities that facilitate a structured yet compassionate exploration of the ways in which we are predisposed to cause harm as researchers operating within systems designed to cause harm.
• Proposals on how we might begin to practice and embody alternative ways of doing the work of research, through approaches that center reciprocity over extraction.

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