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Three-Month Intentional Community Research Residency Proposal
The Emergent Systems and Transience Research Institute (ESTRI) is a living research project dedicated to understanding who individuals, communities, and systems can become when allowed to emerge wholly as themselves. We study emergence as becoming, and transience as intentional movement and impermanence.
Intentional communities are at the heart of these properties. We are currently seeking partner communities to pilot a three-month embedded research residency.
An ESTRI researcher is trained in trauma-informed dynamics, communication archetypes, social system observation, and non-extractive documentation. Our researchers also bring technical, organizational, and relational infrastructure-building skills—including community-specific data systems, bespoke facilitation training, emergent leadership models, and support for clarity in both structure and care.
The residency follows a three-phase arc:
- Month 1: Observation, Participation, Learning
The researcher integrates slowly—learning the rhythms, relationships, and needs of the community. - Month 2: Co-Creation
Based on observations, the researcher works with community members to design and prototype tools, structures, or processes that serve the existing flow—never overriding it. - Month 3: Modeling & Transition
The researcher supports others in using and embodying the tools created. Leadership, facilitation, and documentation are handed off—scaffolding autonomy, not dependence.
At the end of the residency, the researcher exits with care. We design our departure from day one—not out of detachment, but to ensure what’s built can live independently. Ongoing relationship is always possible: follow-up, future visits, and care-based connection are offered but never assumed.
ESTRI is fundamentally non-extractive. We do not study communities as subjects—we enter them as collaborators. We seek to listen, respond, build together, and leave behind clarity, tools, and frameworks that reflect who the community already is.
Upcoming Researcher Placements
Time Frame: Placement timelines are flexible and based on community fit. Most placements run approximately 8–12 weeks.
We are currently identifying aligned communities interested in piloting our embedded research residency. Placements are hosted by one or more members of the ESTRI team, depending on community needs, researcher availability, and mutual resonance.
About ESTRI Researchers
ESTRI researchers come from multidisciplinary backgrounds including systems design, education, trauma-informed care, information theory, facilitation, and embedded field research. Many are self-taught or community-trained, and bring deep lived experience in edge conditions, community mutual aid, decentralized infrastructure, and cognitive multiplicity.
All researchers are committed to non-extractive methodologies and enter placements with care, humility, and clarity of role. We do not observe from a distance—we embed, participate, and co-create. Our aim is to leave behind tools, language, and frameworks that reflect your community’s specific shape—not impose our own.
As a collective, ESTRI holds a transdisciplinary, transbody, and transient identity. Our researchers may arrive with support animals or access needs, and we always work to ensure reciprocal clarity and mutual ease of integration.
Research Needs and Exchange
ESTRI is in the process of obtaining grant funding to secure transportation and mobile living accommodations for our researchers. We are still in the early stages, though, and need some support throughout our placements.
Currently, our research placement needs are:
- Transportation assistance into community
- Living accommodations for duration of placement. We are happy to help with creation or cleaning of a space if needed.
- Animal acceptance and accommodations. Some researchers may travel with a support animal (typically a dog or cat) trained or in training for trauma support or medical alerts. These animals are integral to our researchers’ safety and function and are included in all placement discussions transparently.
- Assistance securing food and water for duration of stay. ESTRI is currently able to provide a moderate food stipend, but assistance with transportation to grocery stores, access to a community kitchen, and some community food access are deeply helpful to our researchers.
- Access to Internet. If unable to access in direct living accommodation, community access works for us. Our researchers are trained in low-tech methodologies that retain shape even when offline.
Our researchers are trained in survival skills and have lived experience in edge community systems and with direct survival management. They are low-waste, resource aware, and are happy to contribute some physical labor (within ability levels) in addition to research and system production.
Community Exchange
1st Month: Observation and Integration
- Participation in daily life and labor alongside community members
- Initial assessment of relational, logistical, and technical systems
- Identification of informal leadership structures, recurring tensions, and community rhythms
- Private documentation of systemic movement (power, conflict, support, decision-making)
- Early feedback sessions with trusted individuals, if welcomed
2nd Month: Tool Creation and System Mapping
- Co-design of 1–3 community-specific tools (e.g., task-sharing structures, meeting formats, data collection systems, communication protocols)
- Infrastructure proposals for leadership sharing, conflict facilitation, or resource management
- Documentation of emerging system archetypes: what this community is uniquely becoming
- Optional workshops or one-on-one trainings in facilitation, trauma-informed communication, or digital tools, as desired by the community
3rd Month: Modeling and Transfer
- Researcher begins to step back and support others in using the co-developed tools
- Community-led facilitation or coordination begins, with researcher in background role
- Live documentation of use cases, friction points, and adaptations
- Final weeks include intentional preparation for researcher exit: transferring documents, access, and relational responsibilities
- Optional exit ritual or celebration, co-designed with the community
Residency Completion: Closing Documentation and Transition
- Delivery of a Residency Report: a document co-authored by the researcher and the community that outlines observations, outcomes, tools created, and ongoing questions
- Organized repository of digital tools, documents, and systems
- Feedback loop: community reflection on ESTRI process, with option for anonymized inclusion in ESTRI internal research
- Updated agreements for optional future collaboration
One Month Post-Residency: ESTRI Follow-Up and Integration Support
- One scheduled Post-Residency Reflection Session with key community members (virtual or in-person), facilitated by the original researcher or another ESTRI facilitator
- Delivery of a Follow-Up Brief: a written summary based on the reflection session that includes:
- What tools or structures have remained in use
- What adaptations or evolutions have occurred
- New or ongoing community needs
- Questions or considerations for future work
- Optional Tech and Systems Check-In, where applicable, to support refinement or reconfiguration of any technical infrastructure created during the residency
- The researcher formally releases all roles back into the community, with clarity on authorship, ownership, and autonomy of co-created tools
- ESTRI remains in respectful, non-intrusive contact unless otherwise requested—available for light support, documentation requests, or future placement discussions
Final Thoughts on ESTRI Residency
ESTRI is, by definition, a non-extractive research institute. We want to come learn from you, understand who your community is, teach what we feel we can offer, and grow with you.
Our larger research focuses on emergent properties of individuals, communities, and systems. We define emergent properties as the characteristics that arise when a being or structure is forced or allowed to be. These characteristics cannot be broken down into constituent parts. We see this as part of sociology, but more broadly as part of the study of cognition.
How do various intelligences interact and create together?
Our residencies are structured, but never rigid. We hold form lightly, always oriented toward relational integrity and clarity. We know that communities are not control groups—they are living systems with unique rhythms, frictions, and gifts. Our aim is not to standardize. It is to accompany. To document. To build tools that reflect what is already true.
If your community is interested in hosting an ESTRI researcher, we invite conversation. We welcome your questions, your caution, your hopes. We do not seek to convince—we seek to align. If it is a fit, we will know through mutual recognition.
Please feel free to reach out via our website, es-tri.org, or directly to contact.estri@protonmail.com. We are excited to continue building this work in community—with intention, with care, and with the emergent unknown.