Doing STS centers and develops methods of care. This means caring for the tools, materials, animals, plants, and microbes that show up in the more-than-human contact zones of our shared practice. It also means caring for each other: attending to the multiple histories, concepts, technologies, and bodies that inflect our shared work. We go slow and practice caution about what worlds our research helps to make or unmake. STS and affect studies work often require access to paywalled articles or travel to conferences. Care also includes sharing money, food, transportation, gear, and pirated academic resources like meeting rooms or university library passwords.

We work to unsettle the taken-for-granteds of science and tech knowledge production that leave little space for neurodiversity, chronic illness, poverty, Blackness, Indigeneity, and gender and sexual difference. We turn instead to atmospheres of living and pay attention to vibes and gut feelings. Our care methods highlight the performativity of practice: how what we do tends some relationships and neglects others. In this way, care signals the inseparability of knowledge work and everyday life amidst the economic, political, and ecological pressures that inform or impossibilize ways of living and studying together.

2023 Labs

This year, Doing STS is composed of three labs. WriteLab is a weekly affect-driven theory writing meetup. Otherwise Tastes is a series of critical feminist fermentation workshops. Smellworlds is an ongoing project to work with and develop sensory methods through smellwalks and DIY perfumery.

All three labs entail daily acts of care: self-care as integral to writing practice, tending jars of fermenting mash as their microbial flora care for our gut health, or gardening plants whose roots or petals both resource our DIY perfumery and lift our moods with scent. But academic productivity risks these relations. Likewise, being sick or sad, tediously skimming off bad yeast, or spending hours lost in a tableful of perfumery ingredients disrupts the tempo of scholarly work. In this way, rubrics of care help to track interests, attachments, politics, and ways of working. They offer a humble ethical grounding for doing STS and affect work beyond institutional contexts that demand forms of legibility despite the messiness of practice.