Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - I

Abstract

STS making and doing turns STS lessons about the non-linearity of knowledge production, expression, and travel, and about the strength of material agency, onto STS engagements in the field. Making and doing practices stand out by contributing in new ways to the production of STS knowledge as well as to the expression and travel of that knowledge. Much of the energy and passion in making and doing projects emerges in moments and experiences of scholarly instability and expansion. Effecting flows of STS knowledge into the field and reflexively learning from those flows raises new issues and tends to bring the scholar into the scholarship. Uncertainties emerge in the contents and possibilities of flow as relations and stakes multiply. Situated resistance becomes a virtual given. Seemingly-connected projects produce widely-variable temporalities and spatialities that are difficult to predict or control. Ethical issues and surprises become paramount as scholars position STS knowledge to re-affect their fields. Professional identities lose recognizable form as methods and media expand. Knowledge travel becomes fully intertwined with knowledge production, requiring full yet non-navel-gazing author presence in scholarly accounts. How do STS scholars of making and doing string together engagements with reflexive learning while accepting accountability and taking account of knowledge politics? These sessions share experimental contributions that focus on the return flows that making and doing activities generate.

Chair

• Gary Downey, Virginia Tech

Individual Presentations

• STS on the Street and at the Court: Interlocutors in the Taiwan RCA Collective Occupational Disease Lawsuit - Yi-Ping Lin, National Yang-Ming University; Hsin-Hsing Chen, Shih-Hsin University Graduate Institute for Social Transformation Studies

• STS as a Third Space between Evidence-Based Medicine and the Human Sciences - Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam

• The Ground Keeps Opening Up: Building an Infrastructure for Data Appropriation - Dawn Nafus, Intel

• Participatory Data Design - Torben Elgaard Jensen, Aalborg University Copenhagen; Andreas Birkbak, Aalborg University Copenhagen; Anders Koed Madsen, Aalborg University; Anders Kristian Munk, Aalborg University

• Office for Scientific Flotsam and Jetsam: The Shifting Grounds of an Incubation - Michael Guggenheim, Goldsmiths, University of London; Judith Kröll, Center; Bernd Kräftner, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Session Organizers

• Gary Downey, Virginia Tech

• Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Athena Institute, VU Amsterdam