Why Not a Garden? Confronting the Praxis of Qualitative Lab Work

• In Event: Being a Lab, Studying a Lab: Practicing Good Relations in Building Qualitative Research Infrastructures - I

Abstract

Prompted by a tweet from a historian of science this year that queried why a lab and not “a workshop (as in the Renaissance) or even a garden” (Yoon 2021) in the social science framing of sustained collaborations and distributed labor, we consider what makes a lab “a lab” and not something else. We approach this from the dual standpoint of the early stages of co-assembling a qualitative research lab and from our joint research project tracking the movement of ideas and materiality across things called labs (in universities and venture-backed capital projects).
In both our praxis and our research, we encounter questions of relations, ethics, and institutional considerations. Studying established and dense collaborations has had an iterative effect on our own efforts to construct a generous space of collaboration and mentorship that embraces a specifically feminist STS ethos. Such ethos is challenged by the practicalities of working within institutional spaces outside the research infrastructures and resources of a traditional STEM model. In the spaces that we research, we are likewise confronted by disparate disparities, those brought on by the financial and technoscientific realities of institutional work. In response to pressures from our own educational institutions, as well as those we study, how can we grow a garden where people expect a lab?

Authors

• Megan Tracy, James Madison University

• Rebecca Howes-Mischel, James Madison University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology