A feminist techno­science and affect studies methods lab


hello@doingsts.com

Doing STS is a Vancouver-based
nonprofit (S0077711)

A feminist techno­science and affect studies methods lab

ORDINARY PRACTICE

Doing STS stages accessible and collaborative opportunities for play and learning with science and technology studies (STS) and affect via ordinary and DIY practice. We host free public workshops, book clubs, and research jams. Through writing, walking, mapping, 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.2

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)
  1. Dimitris Papadopoulos, "Alter-ontologies: Towards a Constituent Politics in Technoscience," Social Studies of Science 41, no. 2 (2010): 177–201.
  2. John Law, "And if the Global Were Small and Noncoherent? Method, Complexity, and the Baroque," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 1 (2004): 13–26.

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 Director

Sophia Jaworski

Director of Research

Reuben Jentink

Director of Education

Ceall Quinn

Director of Political Ecology

Sarah Law 婉雯

Director of Engagement

Morgan Legal

2025 Fellow

Sybil Willoughby

2025 Fellow


Mathew Arthur

Director

Mathew Arthur is an instructor in Women's and Gender Studies at Capilano Universirt and a PhD candidate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's 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 Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 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

CV (PDF)



Sarah Law 婉雯

Director of Community Engagement

Sarah 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 Fellow

Hayden 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 Fellow

Quinn 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.

Advisory Board

Lindsey A. Freeman

Simon Fraser University

Vivienne Bozalek

University of the Western Cape

Jonas Fritsch

IT University of Copenhagen

Kelly Fritsch

Carleton University

Donna J. Haraway

Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz

Omar Kasmani

Freie Universität Berlin

Linda Knight

RMIT University

Dana Luciano

Rutgers University

Erin Manning

Concordia University

Andrew Murphie

Independent

Natasha Myers

York University

Coleman Nye

Simon Fraser University

Dimitris Papadopoulos

University of Nottingham

Joseph C. Russo

Wesleyan University

Donovan O. Schaefer

University of Pennsylvania

Gregory J. Seigworth

Millersville University

Chad Shomura

University of Colorado Denver

Alexis Shotwell

Carleton University

Nathan Snaza

University of Richmond

Stephanie Springgay

McMaster University

Kathleen C. Stewart

Emeritus, UT Austin

Katie Strom

CSU, East Bay

Juanita Sundberg

University of British Columbia

Sarah E. Truman

University of Melbourne

Amanda D. Watson

Simon Fraser University

Jie Yang

Simon Fraser University

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.

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

188 pages, color
9798865488255
DOI 10.22387/EIAL

Free online
$34.00

GET THE BOOK
Free PDF
Buy in Print
IMBRICATE.PRESS Creative Commons (CC by 4.0)
 

PRAISE FOR EVERYTHING IS A LAB


The book works as exercises in writing and being together. It registers with care the circulation of practices, techniques, and affects that define the many labs through which we articulate what a community of sensing and thinking is. The book participates in the past years of research addressing labs beyond the strictly scientific, while also thus expanding the very insights into what are the situated spaces and shared affects of knowing and theorizing.

—Jussi Parikka, co-author of The Lab Book

 

Taking seriously the proposition that science is ordinary, this dazzling book encourages us to consider how we do and might make worlds with care, courage and imagination. It pushes the boundaries of theory and practice, collecting together experimental writing and write-ups with beautiful images from collaborative workshops, pulling us into the worlds of bees, inviting us to turn ourselves into sensors, providing us with guides to compose new scents and more-than-human substances—and lots more besides. It is a treasure trove of a book, designed to delight and inspire researchers across STS and affect studies.

—Rebecca Coleman, author of Glitterworlds

2025


 

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

Insurgent Residues

A Critical STS Encyclopedia of Extractivism

Insurgent Residues is a collaborative critical digital humanities project that aims to build a living STS encyclopedia of extractivism in “British Columbia.” Drawing inspiration from Feral Atlas and feminist technoscience studies, we will gather short, multimodal pieces that each focus on chemicals, infrastructures, scientific practices, or breakdown products in extractive systems.

Entries might follow materialities and more-than-human lifeforms such as xanthates in mineral processing, the “poise” of an aquifer, dust, fracking fluids, forestry pesticides, or acidification as a breakdown process, tracing extraction across its full arc: from origin to supply chain to commodity to residue and waste.

Every other Wednesday, 6-8pm PST
Starting November 12, 2025
Near Commercial-Broadway Station
Join Us

Nov

The project will unfold through two linked components:

  • Encyclopedic Archive

    A digital platform and accompanying publication that critically discusses and resynthesizes scattered and technical chemical and industrial data through an STS lens, combining archival fragments, community knowledge, and multimodal annotations to build extractivism literacy

  • Mapping Extraction

    Collective mapping of extractive headquarters and corporate nodes connected to global supply chains and “permission to pollute” regimes.
A series of open workshops will bring together co-writing, research sprints, and mapping sessions. We invite collaborators across STS, anthropology, geography, environmental humanities, critical mapping, Indigenous law and others interested in community-based research to join us in building an insurgent archive of extraction.

Led by Sophia Jaworski and Mathew Arthur

Smellworlds Workshop

Mathew Arthur

Smellworlds began as an amateur perfuming practice at the kitchen table during the Covid-19 pandemic and quickly turned into a how-to zine, an online archive of books about smell, and a series of academic workshops and talks. On August 19, 2025, we held a critical perfumery workshop for staff from Curiko, a local disability nonprofit. We learned about olfactory families, how STS and affect can help us to think critically about toxicity and desire, and made our own scents from a kit of aromachemicals, resins, and natural oils.

Read the handout:
Workshop (PDF)

Aug

Some examples of where smellworlds has travelled:
  • “Scenting Relations: Exploring Smellworlds through Zine-Making” workshop, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, Toronto, 2021
  • “Smellworlds: Minor Sense” keynote and workshop at 3Ecologies Institute, Montréal, 2021
  • “Performativity Beyond Bodies” workshop for GSWS 822 “Feminist Theory,” Simon Fraser University, 2022
  • “Smellworlds” panel series, 4S Annual Meeting, Honolulu, 2023
  • “Forage, Tincture, Age: DIY Perfumery as STS Method” presentation, 4S Honolulu, 2023
  • “Smellworlds: Affect and the Colonial Sensorium” lecture and workshop for SA 887 “Ethnographic Sensibility," Simon Fraser University, 2023
  • “Smellworlds,” sensory methods workshop at Promises/Impasses/Threats/Settlings, Society for the Study of Affect (SSA), Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2024
  • “Smellworlds: Vibes, Regionality, Synaesthetic Writing,” keynote at #PITS, SSA, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2024

View Photos

Some examples of where smellworlds has travelled:
  • “Scenting Relations: Exploring Smellworlds through Zine-Making” workshop, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, Toronto, 2021
  • “Smellworlds: Minor Sense” keynote and workshop at 3Ecologies Institute, Montréal, 2021
  • “Performativity Beyond Bodies” workshop for GSWS 822 “Feminist Theory,” Simon Fraser University, 2022
  • “Smellworlds” panel series, 4S Annual Meeting, Honolulu, 2023
  • “Forage, Tincture, Age: DIY Perfumery as STS Method” presentation, 4S Honolulu, 2023
  • “Smellworlds: Affect and the Colonial Sensorium” lecture and workshop for SA 887 “Ethnographic Sensibility," Simon Fraser University, 2023
  • “Smellworlds,” sensory methods workshop at Promises/Impasses/Threats/Settlings, Society for the Study of Affect (SSA), Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2024
  • “Smellworlds: Vibes, Regionality, Synaesthetic Writing,” keynote at #PITS, SSA, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 2024

Playing with Clinical Jargon

Mathew Arthur & Annie Zeng

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? 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

Apr

Playing with Clinical Jargon

Mathew Arthur & Annie Zeng

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? 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

Apr

View Photos

Our workshop gathered nonprofit workers, students, academics (from the fields of medical anthropology and gender studies), designers, and artists. We met for four hours on a sunny but cold April day at Curiko, a disability nonprofit. Through facilitated discussion, writing exercises, and an accompanying illustrated zine, participants encountered medical jargon as a material phenomenon tangled up with feelings.

Selected writings from this workshop appear in the book The Matter of Hospitals: An Alphabetical Investigation, edited by Anna Harris (Maastricht University Press, 2025).

Download the workshop materials:
Zine (PDF)Implosion Cards (PDF)
Playing With Clinical Jargon is a collaboration between Maastricht-based medical education platform Fringe Editions, Doing STS, and Los Angeles-based public programmer Annie Zeng.
Playing With Clinical Jargon is a collaboration between Maastricht-based medical education platform Fringe Editions, Doing STS, and Los Angeles-based public programmer Annie Zeng.

2024


 
Slideshow photos: Caell Quinn

2024 Events

Everyday Affective Ecologies

at Fifth and Pine


Vancouver’s ‘pop-up’ pollinator park at 5th and Pine gathers together overlapping processes, imaginaries, and agencies. Part of the in-progress Burrard Slopes park project, the site was built in 2016 and exemplifies urban planning initiatives to 'green the city' through community-based endeavors. A lack of consistent maintenance of the site over years has resulted in a proliferation of feisty plants and a weedy seedbank. Visit the park today and you will encounter small dramas of succession—hedge bindweed fells strands of aster on the eastern flank, blackberry brambles act out turf wars with prickly lettuces, and July tansy blooms paint the premises yellow. To address this situation, the city has attempted to organize a stewardship group to intervene in the chaotic flux of plant life and vitalize community presence in the neighborhood; this workshop invites you to take part in this stewardship effort.

Alongside weeding, pruning, and seed saving, we will play in the genre of a Bioblitz using iNaturalist to produce a record of floral and faunal community composition. In conjunction with these more ‘pragmatic’ activities, materials will be provided for aesthetic and artistic experimentation. Taking up the call of how we might ‘conspire with plants’ (Myers 2024), we ask participants to consider the force of categories like invasive, native, and feral. What might urban ecological formations characterized by ‘spontaneous forms of nature’ (Gandy 2023) and nondesign have to teach us about naturecultural politics in the present moment? And, what practices can we develop for attuning sensoriums to everyday ecologies?

LED BY CEALL QUINN

WITH REUBEN JENTINK

September 7th, 12 to 3pm
Pop-Up Park at 5th and Pine
1696 W 5th Avenue, Vancouver
If possible, please rapid test for Covid-19 before attending.
RESERVE A SPOT

Read Quinn's post about Bee Smellscapes on the 4S blog

View Photos

Patchy Anthropocene Reading Group

Ceall Quinn & Mathew Arthur

Join us every second Monday from 6 to 7:30pm at Studio Utopia to read aloud from the Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene and A Bestiary of the Anthropocene. After each week's reading, we will do a 30-minute writing exercise modelled after Katie Stewart and Lauren Berlant's Hundreds. Starts September 9, drop-ins welcome.

Every second Monday, 2024
Studio Utopia, 2414 Main Street
Ring doorbell or text 604 842-4412
(Wheelchair inaccessible)
hello@doingsts.com

Sept

2023


 

Working with Herbs in TCM

Hayden Ostrom

If 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

Handout TCM Library

May

Climate Mourning, Slow and Soft

Sarah Law 婉雯, Simon Fraser University

The climate crisis elicits grief. This workshop explores practices of care, mourning, and rest. Together, we'll engage in meditation, arts-based reflection, and writing exercises to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy replicate in the making of ecological crisis. 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
Room 1315, SFU Harbour Centre
REGISTER HERE

Zine (PDF)

Jun

Climate Mourning, Slow and Soft

Sarah Law 婉雯, Simon Fraser University

The climate crisis elicits grief. This workshop explores practices of care, mourning, and rest. Together, we'll engage in meditation, arts-based reflection, and writing exercises to explore how capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy replicate in the making of ecological crisis. 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
Room 1315, SFU Harbour Centre
REGISTER HERE

Zine (PDF)

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
Studio Utopia, 2414 Main Street
REGISTER HERE

Jun

Pollinator Smellwalk

Ceall Quinn, University of British Columbia

How 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, August 27th, 2023
Pollinator Park, 5th and Pine
REGISTER HERE

Aug

Pollinator Smellwalk

Ceall Quinn, University of British Columbia

How 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, August 27th, 2023
Pollinator Park, 5th and Pine
REGISTER HERE

Aug

Walking and Writing Viaducts

Reuben Jentink

Are 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.

September, 2023
Location TBD

Sept

Doing STS is (a lab) composed of four labs

WriteLab

WriteLab was a weekly meetup. Now, it takes shape as ad hoc workshops. WriteLab looks to compositional methods across STS and affect studies.

Otherwise Tastes

Otherwise Tastes is a series of critical herbalism and fermentation workshops. It explores the relationship between taste, microbial worlds, and politics and cultivates an appetite for doing theory from the kitchen table.

Smellworlds

Smellworlds is an ongoing project to develop sensory methods through smellwalks and DIY perfumery.

Insurgent Residues

Insurgent Residues is a collaborative critical digital humanities project that aims to build a living STS encyclopedia of extractivism in “British Columbia.”

Experimental Study as Care

All four 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, gardening plants whose roots or petals both resource our DIY perfumery and lift our moods with scent, or caring for the toxic and compromised landscapes we inhabit.

Academic productivity risks these relations. Likewise, being sick or sad, tediously skimming off bad yeast, 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)

WriteLab Library

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.

Smellworlds Library
Browse

Smellworlds: A Critical DIY Perfuming Primer
PDFBuy in Print

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. Engaging 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.

Beginnings

Hum 101 Public Program

Vancouver Public Library, Strathcona Branch

Doing STS began as a public program (led by Mathew Arthur) with Hum 101 at the University of British Columbia, a free school for residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Downtown South. From 2017 to 2021, this weekly feminist technoscience salon at Carnegie Community Centre and the Vancouver Public Library's nə́c̓aʔmat ct Strathcona Branch hosted a mix of multigenerational and neurodiverse attendees, including ESL learners, refugees, residential school survivors, activists, and artists.


(Photo: Dialogue)