We Always Make and Do More: The Collateral Realities of Methodological Rigor

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - II

Abstract

Making & Doing projects provide an excellent pathway to make STS knowledge and expertise travel to new areas, while it offers a platform for both practitioners and researchers to learn, to act and to change. However, to leave a sustainable mark in the ecology of practices requires methodological rigor. Traditionally this rigor is externally defined, inflexible and applied upon arrival. Our rigor, however, comes over time, is derived on location and from within. Whereas practice optimization acts as our spot on the horizon, navigating towards it produces collateral realities that require our attention as well. Methodological rigor, it turns out, comes with mess and vulnerabilities for all involved. In Making & Doing no one stays clean, all involved -including us- are contaminated. In our presentation we want to discuss the methodological rigor that Making & Doing requires and the ‘interventionist principle of symmetry’ that these kinds of projects harbor.

Authors

• jessica mesman, Maastricht University

• Katherine Carroll, Australian National University