Counterspaces: Decentering Whiteness to Create Polyvocal Counterstories in Feminist Technoscience

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - II

Abstract

In this paper we share the contributions of LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering), an interdisciplinary coherent group of scholars who collaborate not only across fields, but also race, ethnicity and institution, to advance faculty diversity in technoscience through professional development interventions and a ethnographic study of the program and its organizers. Our commitment to critical methodologies in the social/intellectual movement to desegregate technoscience requires that we decenter whiteness to co-produce counterstories in our STS knowledge production. Using critical methodologies, like Participatory Action Research, we create counterspaces aimed at generating interpretative communities. In doing so, we augment traditional lab studies to include research participants as active co-creators of knowledge, not subjects being studied. In our cross-race collaboration, the principled frameworks of love and friendship are deployed to deter the reproduction of extractive processes predominantly guiding race relations in the U.S. since colonialism, and continually influenced by neocolonialism. We engage in this work to document and disseminate an adaptable research practice used to combat the problematic tendency of social scientists speaking *for* and not *with* their interlocutors and to more fully represent the complexity of women’s lives and experiences in technoscience. With love and in friendship, we create polyvocal counterstories to contribute to feminist STS scholars’ efforts to catalyze alternative pathways for women from all ethnicities to collectively thrive in technoscience and, by extension, society more broadly.

Authors

• Coleen Carrigan, California Polytechnic State University

• Katie Kuhl, University of Washington