Nightflows

NightFlows: A mapping of community-based care practices

Tags:

Year:

Research, Community Care, Wellbeing, Feminist Nighttime

2026

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Alignment with UN SDGs:

Healthy & Safety
Gender Equality & Social Inclusion

NightFlows is an independent research project developed by Connexxa in collaboration with the Nighttime Foundation as its knowledge partner. It maps community-based care practices in the European electronic music scene: awareness teams, consent protocols, safer space practices, and other forms of care that communities have built for people's wellbeing, with particular focus on femme-identifying and queer individuals.

This work is built by people with a direct stake in the night. Sometimes it comes from inside a community, built by and for itself. Sometimes a community invites practices in from outside, adapting them to its own space. Either way, it is often underfunded and unrecognised, not because it lacks value, but because very little of it has been documented or supported. NightFlows treats it as what it is: knowledge, produced under structural conditions of hostility.

The first phase maps who provides this care, what has been built, and why. It also creates space to surface conflictual nodes: tensions present in the field that are rarely named in a structured way, though they often surface on their own in conversation. Among them: the political nature of care built by people who have been marginalised. The risk that making this knowledge visible means extracting it from those who built it. How this knowledge can circulate in ways that serve the people who built it. NightFlows also maps the current needs of those building care, because research that only takes without asking what people need is not built with communities. It is built on them.\

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The Nighttime Foundation grounds this research, validating the approach and amplifying it across the nighttime sector. Findings will be disseminated at ADE Amsterdam, 22-25 October 2026.

Participants take part in a conversational interview of approx 60 minutes. In return, their practice is witnessed, credited, and made part of a living, open dataset, structured information about what exists, not packaged for others to copy.

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Outputs

First report, in collaboration with Nighttime Foundation, October 2026.
Open dataset under CC BY licence.

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If you build care into your nights, or know someone who does, NightFlows wants to hear from you. Fill in the form to register your availability. Interviews run through July and August 2026.

Key outcomes

Documents who builds care in European nightlife and how, making this work visible and citable as knowledge rather than informal practice.

Advances wellbeing as a more precise and generative frame than safety alone for designing nighttime spaces.

Surfaces structural tensions in how care work is recognised, funded, and circulated.

Strengthens the European network of collectives, organisations, and researchers working on care in nightlife.

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