The text you will find on these coding pages is a frozen moment of a collaborative process of discussing what we desire from the RUSTlab.
Physically, the RUSTlab consists of two rooms outside the campus of the Ruhr-University Bochum that offer space to experiment with material things, including methods and data as well as concepts. The lab also is a form of working and learning together and experimenting with the forms of working and learning in academia. The lab experiments with formats of togetherness both in academia as well as in earthly conditions where technologies, nature and humans are intricately linked. The lab is a physical space where we provide means and objects to engage in high- and low-tech mapping, showing, writing and telling. But the lab is also the set of experiments, practices and points of view that we follow, and a continuous reflection over our ways of acting. As a lab, we are committed to a way of working together, supporting each other, and opening quotidian scientific practices to students, non-scientists and the public.
This document that we call the “coding” is accessible to every lab member. It can be made available to our friends and co-laborators so they can understand how we work and why we are interested in the making of knowledge, technologies, standardization or ecologies. Many people have contributed to this collective document. The lab coding book is a situational material compound to our lab. We enact it in a variety of ways, and we will remain to experiment with it as a description and inscription of our lab work. It does not easily translate into practice and this unease is what we want to be attentive to.
Coding is a constant process and remains a matter of concern in everything we do. It offers the work in progress of our commitment, practices and codes of conduct for being together in the RUSTlab. It serves as a record of our work and serves navigation purposes since in it we note our wishes for the future and things to take care of in the present. It transpires what the lab desires, materializes our imaginaries, and documents our experiences. But most importantly, its existence and iterative revisions are devices for continuously reminding ourselves to consider how we do academia and if this indeed corresponds to academia as we want it.
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This lab coding emerges out of local discussions and is tightly knitted into our experiences in academia and our fields alike. We were inspired by the CLEAR Lab book of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research in Turtle Island and the introduction to this book by Martina Schlünder in 2019. Readers familiar with Science & Technology Studies (STS) vocabulary will recognize implicit references to STS work. However, we have refrained from referencing work explicitly, as we want to read the lab coding more as a flow of reflections on practice than as a scholarly text. We hope our document can work as an inspiration to other labs as well. Each lab-code, however, will require a precise localization to each individual desires and philosophy. Coding cannot be simply implemented.
The coding book is also meant to highlight what often remains implicit and invisible in academic life. While heroism, individualism, and hierarchy are very powerful in academia, and we recognize that our lab does not exist outside of them, we attempt to counteract them by caring for the solidarity and relationality that is also part of (academic) life. You are not individually responsible for being good, but you are asked to question what makes it so hard in academia to show solidarity and be relation-oriented, in society and the world.
The coding should serve for external people to get to know the lab and help its members to understand it better and reflect on it. For now, our coding includes different sections where we describe how we think of ourselves and how we (hope to) behave among each other. The sections describe the settings where we meet, the rules and expectations of participation in these settings, procedures to become a member, student involvement, friends and networks, and tries to set the ground on how we communicate internally and externally, what are the roles of our members, and how we position ourselves to tricky constraints such as power dynamics and funding our togetherness.