Many of us have roots in ethnography and commit to its participatory character. We foster the participatory competencies of ethnography in approaching our field not as distanced interlocutors but as co-laborators. We achieve this by opening the lab for co-laborators and organizing sessions where we discuss co-laborator’s issues and ideas. This life of the lab as an open space enabling participatory formats resonates with the lab’s coding as not simply critiquing reactively but working proactively towards intervening and building.
We take inspiration from groups in the field of STS that use data and data visualizations as boundary objects to foster heterogeneous engagement in “data sprints” (TANTlab.aau.dk) and develop tailored modes of engagement with our fields.
We often work in settings of heterogeneous actors, both within our fields and within our academic settings, hence one of the first intervention formats we explored was a mapping event with an interdisciplinary project group two members are part of. Using the publications from project members as source material, we mapped the co-occurrence of most frequently used terms in the papers (using semantic analysis software CorText). This gave us a mapping of the landscape of disciplines in the project. To follow our intent of proactive engagement rather than reactive description, we used this mapping to get into a conversation with project members. The project members interpreted the model themselves and found surprising clusters and explanations. The mapping was in the following used to discuss how formats of interdisciplinary encounters were working for the project group and what new formats were needed, e.g., to establish a further connection between the clusters in the mapping.
Add Fieldwork Crash-Course?
Interdisciplinary Writing Group
“lab Visits” with SecHuman people