ORDINARY PRACTICE
Doing STS is a methods lab that works across feminist science and technology studies and affect studies through public workshops, lectures, reading and writing groups, and experimental publications. We stage accessible and collaborative opportunities for play and learning with STS and affect via ordinary and DIY practice. Through zinemaking, textile and papercrafting, fermenting, composting, and other modes of making, we “craft with matter”1 to materialize alternative futures. We actively develop methods of care and anticolonial science and tech literacies with an emphasis on how emergent global complexities are made and experienced in small, local practices that include messiness, hunches, and mistakes.BECOME A MEMBER
While anyone can attend our events, we are funded by our members. Support us with a small one-time or reccurring membership fee. Members are welcome to join in on planning, give a workshop or public lecture, and can vote on future intiatives at our annual meeting. Fees are not considered a charitable donation and we are unable to issue tax reciepts.Join Now
hello@doingsts.com
Doing STS is a Vancouver-based
nonprofit (S0077711)
- Dimitris Papadopoulos, "Alter-ontologies: Towards a Constituent Politics in Technoscience," Social Studies of Science 41, no. 2 (2010): 177–201.
Advisory Board
Karen Bray
Wesleyan CollegeLindsey A. Freeman
Simon Fraser UniversityJonas Fritsch
IT University of CopenhagenKelly Fritsch
Carleton UniversityDonna J. Haraway
Emeritus, UC Santa CruzOmar Kasmani
Freie Universität BerlinLinda Knight
RMIT UniversityDana Luciano
Rutgers UniversityErin Manning
Concordia UniversityAndrew Murphie
IndependentNatasha Myers
York UniversityColeman Nye
Simon Fraser UniversityDimitris Papadopoulos
University of NottinghamJoseph C. Russo
Wesleyan UniversityDonovan O. Schaefer
University of PennsylvaniaGregory J. Seigworth
Millersville UniversityChad Shomura
University of Colorado DenverAlexis Shotwell
Carleton UniversityNathan Snaza
University of RichmondStephanie Springgay
McMaster UniversityKathleen C. Stewart
Emeritus, UT AustinJuanita Sundberg
University of British ColumbiaSarah E. Truman
University of MelbourneAmanda D. Watson
Simon Fraser UniversityTeam
Doing STS offers fellowships for graduate students, early-career scholars, artists, and activists working alongside STS and affect. Small member-funded seed grants support fellows to design and lead a public workshop or lecture.
Mathew Arthur
DirectorSarah Law 袁文
2023 FellowHayden Ostrom
2023 FellowCeall Quinn
2023 Fellow
Mathew Arthur
DirectorMathew Arthur is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Simon Fraser University. He is co-editor in chief of Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry and Imbricate! Press (an open access affect studies imprint), and chair of the Westar Insitute’s working group on the Human Future. His work reads across feminist and Indigenous technoscience and develops care-centred methods for multispecies research in DIY practices of fermenting, composting, and amateur perfumery. From 2017 to 2022, he led a weekly feminist technoscience salon at the VPL nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch. His writing has been published in Capacious, Canadian Theatre Review, Fieldsights, Fordham University Press’ Transdisciplinary Theological Colloquia series, and Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. His first book is forthcoming in the Advanced Methods: New Research Ontologies series with Punctum Press.
mathew_arthur@sfu.ca
+1 604 842-4412
Full CV 2019 East 5th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada, V5N 1M3
+1 604 842-4412
Full CV 2019 East 5th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada, V5N 1M3
Education
| PhD | Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Simon Fraser University, 2024 |
| MA | Indigenous and Interreligious Studies, Vancouver School of Theology, 2018 |
Research and Teaching Fields
|
Science and Technology Studies Affect Studies Multispecies Studies Feminist Methods Ethnographic Methods Religion, Theology, and Science |
Publications
Books
| 2024 | Doing Multispecies Theology: Animism, Indigeneity, Technoscience, Advanced Methods: New Research Ontologies Series, Punctum Press |
Refereed Articles |
|
| 2024 | “Affect Studies,” Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture, eds. Michael Gardiner & Julian Haladyn |
| 2021 | “Foreword: Working the Social, Otherwise,” in Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives, eds. Vivienne Bozalek & Bob Pease, Routledge |
| 2020 |
“Writing Pandemic Feels,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 2, nos. 1–2 |
| “Affect Studies,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, ed. Eugene O’Brian, Oxford University Press | |
Co-Authored Refereed Articles |
|
| 2018 | With Reuben Jentink, “Composting Settler Nationalisms,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 3 |
Online Articles |
|
| 2020 | “Four Alleys,” Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights |
Editorships |
|
| 2020 | Editor-in-Chief, Imbricate! Press |
| 2016 | Editor-in-Chief, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Open Humanities Press |
Book Chapters |
|
| 2019 | “Writing Affect and Theology in Indigenous Futures,” in Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies, eds. Karen Bray & Stephen Moore, Fordham University Press |
Book Reviews |
|
| 2019 | “Bodying Difference Differently: Immersions in Cultural Difference by Natalie Alvarez,” Canadian Theatre Review, no. 176 |
Memberships
Radical Open Access CollectiveAmerican Studies Association
Society for Social Studies of Science
Affect Studies Society
Peer Review
Duke University PressJournal of Embodied Research
Mattering Press
Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies
Public Philosophy Journal
Social Media + Society
Sarah Law 袁文
2023 FellowSarah Law is a graduate student in sociology at Simon Fraser University. She is a climate justice organizer and facilitator. Her undergraduate honours thesis explored climate action, ecological grief, and the politics of mourning. She is interested in eco grief, care practices, late capitalist affects, and worldmaking and knowledge mobilization beyond neoliberalism. Alongside her master's thesis, Sarah's current projects include Holding Climate Emotions, a climate justice conference exploring imagination as protest amidst climate grief through youth activist-led workshops, research presentations, and dialogue.
Hayden Ostrom
2023 FellowHayden Ostrom is a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) student and practicing herbalist. Hayden completed a bachelors in interdisciplinary cognitive sciences at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in intersections of somatics, subjectivity, and ecology. Hayden's work poses questions about health—of humans, place, and nonhuman kin. Starting from the understanding that we are inextricably enmeshed in more-than-human worlds, what counts as good health? What might reciprocal health practices look like? Hayden's research takes place in his garden, where he engages in practices of soil remediation, critical permaculture, and herbalism. He has a professional background in harm reduction, linguistics research, and small scale agricultural practices.
Ceall Quinn
2023 FellowQuinn is a second year PhD student studying (more-than) human geography on stolen Musequam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands. His work considers the relationships between social imaginaries and biodiversity loss through the lens of managed and wild pollinators. Recently, he has been thinking about ecological subjectivity in urban spaces and how portable practices of attention might foster a greater sense of place and relation with Earth others. When he’s not bee-ing, Quinn loves playing Irish trad tunes, vibing around cityscapes, and reading things he doesn’t understand but might in like, 5 years.
Our Ethics
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.
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.
Lab 1
Tangerine
What can writing do? WriteLab is a weekly drop-in theory writing group modelled loosely after Lauren Berlant and Katie Stewart's "hundreds" and Joe Dumit's "implosion." Looking to compositional methods across STS and affect studies, we'll explore how everyday objects, happenings, and practices texture theory and how theory textures life. We'll experiment with writing alongside what's taking shape or being assembled, staying stuck or fading into the background, to presence atmospheres of indeterminacy and relationships that matter.
Mondays 7-9pm PST
April–November, 2023
Studio Utopia
2414 Main Street
hello@doingsts.com to join
(Wheelchair inaccessible)
Lab 2
Smellworlds are everywhere. Intimate or atmospheric, near-imperceptible or assaulting. They seep and linger, harnessing bodies into movement. Smell is feral and highly regulated: tangled up in appetites, industries, domesticities, toxicities, and public hygienes. Chlorine. CK One. Electrical fire. Garbage. Leather. Locker room. Mr. Clean. Old books. Pencil shavings. Smog. Smudge. Wet dog. Yeast. The intiating proposition of Smellworlds is compositional: that scent or its absence assembles, pulling things into consistency.
Critical engagements with smell are many and few. The literature homes in on cultural histories, neurophysiology, sensory mapping or smellwalk methods, and notions of toxicity and risk. Instead, Smellworlds proposes DIY perfumery as a way into the worldly atmospherics of smell—how smell connects and moves. Bodily, emotionally, wafting here and there. Through a series of public lectures and workshops, we'll explore how the colonial project is a toning of sense: how anthropocentrism, whiteness, and settler nationalism come with cultivated habits of smell and predictable smellscapes.
Lab 3
Multispecies kinships from the kitchen table
Multispecies work is often either abstract or exotic in its empirics. It can require travel for fieldwork, special lab equipment, or access to gatekept institutional relationships. Following species around depends on access to big grants, stable housing, and ample time off work. Instead, Otherwise Tastes cultivates appetites for theory closer to home: from the kitchen table.
Through a series of public workshops and a keynote lecture with Erin Manning, we'll work through vinegar-making practices like alcohol and acetobacter fermentation and engage microbial humanities and feminist STS work on fermentation to explore the relationship between taste, unseen bacterial worlds, and political formations. Through ordinary tactics of witness like colour, temperature, visible mould or yeast, carbonation, or scent, we'll reckon with the tension between technoscientific settler sovereignties and Indigenous and other approaches to multispecies kin.
Through a series of public workshops and a keynote lecture with Erin Manning, we'll work through vinegar-making practices like alcohol and acetobacter fermentation and engage microbial humanities and feminist STS work on fermentation to explore the relationship between taste, unseen bacterial worlds, and political formations. Through ordinary tactics of witness like colour, temperature, visible mould or yeast, carbonation, or scent, we'll reckon with the tension between technoscientific settler sovereignties and Indigenous and other approaches to multispecies kin.
2023
Doing STS lectures and workshops are free and open to the public. While academic in tone, we cultivate atmospheres of shared curiousity and non-mastery. Events are member-funded and led by fellows and collaborators. For detailed accessibility information or to propose an event, email hello@doingsts.com
Working with Herbs in TCM
Hayden OstromIf we are tangled up in more-than-human worlds, what counts as good health? How might we cultivate reciprocity in health practices? Join TCM student and herbalist Hayden Ostrom for a DIY herbalism workshop.
1–4pm, May 6th, 2023
Studio Utopia, 2414 Main Street
(Wheelchair inaccessible)
REGISTER HERE
May
Climate Mourning, Slow and Soft
Sarah Law 袁文, Simon Fraser UniversityThe climate crisis elicits grief. In this workshop, through theories of disability justice and abolition feminism, we'll explore practices of care, mourning, and rest. Together, we'll engage in sensory meditation, arts-based reflection, and writing exercises to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy replicate in the making of ecological crisis and the management of emotions. We'll dream up visions of a just climate future and consider sense-imagination as a form of political protest, giving ourselves a chance to sit with grief in slowness and softness.
1–4pm, June 3rd, 2023
Location TBD
REGISTER HERE
Jun
Climate Mourning, Slow and Soft
Sarah Law 袁文, Simon Fraser UniversityThe climate crisis elicits grief. In this workshop, through theories of disability justice and abolition feminism, we'll explore practices of care, mourning, and rest. Together, we'll engage in sensory meditation, arts-based reflection, and writing exercises to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy replicate in the making of ecological crisis and the management of emotions. We'll dream up visions of a just climate future and consider sense-imagination as a form of political protest, giving ourselves a chance to sit with grief in slowness and softness.
1–3pm, June 3rd, 2023
Location TBD
REGISTER HERE
Jun
Perceptual Ferment
Erin Manning, Concordia"Vinegar mother is both catalyst and remains. Leaving a cloudiness in her wake, she is a reminder of the dephasing from sugar water to vinegar, and of the fact that what is produced is always less a substance in itself than a relational milieu."
Doing STS hosts a lecture and Q+A with Erin Manning, followed by a hands-on DIY vinegar fermentation workshop. Tools and materials provided.
1–4pm, June 18th, 2023
Location TBD
Jun
Pollinator Smellwalk
Ceall Quinn, University of British ColumbiaHow can we develop an ecological self in urban settings so often withdrawn from ecological imaginaries? What kinds of practices of attention can we deploy to cultivate nonhuman kinships? Where might curiosity take us in sensory encounter with Earth others? Approaching pollinator worlds, we'll ask these questions from the perspective of the amateur: "one who loves, lover." Participants are invited to dabble and pause in a space of unprofessional, non-instrumental bee noticing. With scraps of more-than-human ethnography, urban political ecology, and the science of bee and floral perception as guides, we'll gather for a bee smellwalk, tapping into our sensoriums, getting into place, and sharing observations. Bee-ing with pollinator partners in place is a portal for thinking naturecultural entanglements in the city.
1–4pm, July 8th, 2023
Location TBD
Jul
Pollinator Smellwalk
Ceall Quinn, University of British ColumbiaHow can we develop an ecological self in urban settings so often withdrawn from ecological imaginaries? What kinds of practices of attention can we deploy to cultivate nonhuman kinships? Where might curiosity take us in sensory encounter with Earth others? Approaching pollinator worlds, we'll ask these questions from the perspective of the amateur: "one who loves, lover." Participants are invited to dabble and pause in a space of unprofessional, non-instrumental bee noticing. With scraps of more-than-human ethnography, urban political ecology, and the science of bee and floral perception as guides, we'll gather for a bee smellwalk, tapping into our sensoriums, getting into place, and sharing observations. Bee-ing with pollinator partners in place is a portal for thinking naturecultural entanglements in the city.
1–3pm, July 8th, 2023
Location TBD
Jul
Walking and Writing Viaducts
Reuben JentinkAre the Georgia viaducts gardens? Not really, but the City once seemed set on spinning them as a future oasis. In 2016 the Park Board selected James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architect of New York's High Line, to reimagine the 21-acre site. While the High Line's abandoned infrastructure was reworked into a park, here "unworkable" structures will be demolished. What are we being asked to imagine in collective dreams of this downtown park? Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico's Feed takes place on the High Line: a walking poem cataloguing Indigenous disposession, what grows in the park, and heartbreak following a breakup—with a playlist ranging from Beyonce to The Knife. Like Pico, we'll walk the viaducts, writing our way through their histories, nonhuman inhabitants, and possible futures.
1–4pm, August 5th, 2013
Location TBD
Aug
Past Events
SMELLWORLDS
Resonance and Redolance
3EcologiesIn September 2022, Doing STS' Mathew Arthur was invited to lead a multi-day workshop around critical fermentation and DIY perfumery at 3Ecologies in northern Quebec. The gathering was an opportunity to grow kindred interests in fermentation and fragrance and assembled an international group of academics. We experimented with practices of fermenting, tincturing, distillation, and perfume formulation and rehearsed new vocabularies of taste and scent across languages and disciplines.
September 23–25, 2022
Ste-Anne-du-Lac, Quebec
SMELLWORLDS
Past Labs
From 2016–2022, Doing STS was a weekly seminar held at Vancouver Public Library's Strathcona Branch as a public program with Humanities 101 at the University of British Columbia.
Haraway Talks: Reading and Figuring Worlds
OnlineEach week we will meet online to read aloud from interviews with feminist technoscience theorist Donna Haraway. Her work explores how human lives are tangled up in histories of science and empire and in messy relationships with nonhuman others. She generates concepts and figures that dream up ways of living together on a damaged planet.
September 2021 to May 2022
From 2016–2022, Doing STS was a weekly seminar held at Vancouver Public Library's Strathcona Branch as a public program with Humanities 101 at the University of British Columbia.
Speculative Matters: Making Worlds with Zines
Vancouver Public Library, Strathcona Branch“Speculative Matters” is a Hum Public Program with residents of Vancouver’s DTES/South. Everyone is welcome. Come every week or drop in when it works! Let's weave together speculation and fabulation: asking “what if?” and making things up. Each week we will read aloud together from a STS reading, then spend an hour making and writing zines using text, collage, popups, embroidery, etc.
September 2021 to May 2022