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.
Upcoming Events
Upcoming Events
Jargon shapes bodies, senses, and scenes of everyday and medical experiences of health. In this hands-on sensory methods and writing workshop, we experiment with jargon through medical ephemera and clinical objects. Working with a lively archive of pop cultural and medical education media, this workshop asks: how does jargon feel? What worlds does it give us access to? What worlds does it obscure? How is jargon improvised, hacked, recycled, and repurposed for other uses?
Through a series of guided ethnographic exercises from the field of feminist science and technology studies, participants will become public investigators, developing their writing and research skills while making sense of the material, cultural, and felt dimensions of jargon.
Free workshop
April 12, 2025
12 to 4pm
4926 Imperial Street
Register Here
Playing With Clinical Jargon is a collaboration between Maastricht-based medical education platform Fringe Editions, Vancouver-based methods lab Doing STS, and Los Angeles-based public programmer Annie Zeng.
Through a series of guided ethnographic exercises from the field of feminist science and technology studies, participants will become public investigators, developing their writing and research skills while making sense of the material, cultural, and felt dimensions of jargon.Free workshop
April 12, 2025
12 to 4pm
4926 Imperial Street
Register Here
Playing With Clinical Jargon is a collaboration between Maastricht-based medical education platform Fringe Editions, Vancouver-based methods lab Doing STS, and Los Angeles-based public programmer Annie Zeng.
Past Events
Past Events
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
Our Book
Everything is a Lab is a scrapbook and an experiment. It collects the artifacts, written and otherwise, of a year’s worth of public workshops that put science and technology studies and affect studies together. Through zinemaking, collaging, foraging, fermenting, perfuming, and walking together, we do ordinary science from the kitchen table and work to materialize alternative futures. Putting STS and affect together bolsters literacies for how the world is being made and how we might make it differently.
CONTRIBUTORS
Mathew Arthur, Debarah Bulford, Lindsey A. Freeman, Reuben Jentink, Sarah Law 婉雯, Morgaine Lee, Erin Manning, Rowan Melling, Coleman Nye, Hayden Ostrom, Rebecca Peng, Ceall Quinn, Donovan O. Schaefer, Chad Shomura, Becca Soft, Kathleen Stewart, Amanda D. Watson
Mathew Arthur, Debarah Bulford, Lindsey A. Freeman, Reuben Jentink, Sarah Law 婉雯, Morgaine Lee, Erin Manning, Rowan Melling, Coleman Nye, Hayden Ostrom, Rebecca Peng, Ceall Quinn, Donovan O. Schaefer, Chad Shomura, Becca Soft, Kathleen Stewart, Amanda D. Watson
188 pages, color
9798865488255
DOI 10.22387/EIAL
Free online
$34.00
Team
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
Executive DirectorSarah Law 婉雯
Director of Community EngagementReuben Jentink
Education CoordinatorCeall Quinn
Collaborator
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 婉雯
Director of Community EngagementSarah 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.