Contrary to other current endeavours in STS similar to this, we decided to refrain from calling it “code of conduct,” as this notion carries problematic colonial connotation. Furthermore, we settled for the verb “coding” – instead of the noun “code” – to emphasize its processuality. This lab coding is not primarily a set of rules, a code to refer to in conflict. Rather, it is a device for thinking collectively about what we do, and particularly about how we do what we do.
The lab emerged from existing practices within the Ruhr University Bochum, and a desire to have an open working space to engage more experimentally with our research interests. This entails maintaining existing traditional academic formats while at the same time exploring and developing approaches that have gained attention in STS, namely re-tooling, co-laborating, and experimenting with emerging modes of participation in academic life.
The lab is situated in disciplines, in societies, and in a world that we are accountable to. Even though we would like our lab to be a place of harmony and acceptance, we do not shy away from confronting behaviour that makes us uncomfortable. The lab, in this sense, reaches beyond its members and makes itself accountable to the world by stepping outside of our lab group and academia.
We are convinced that the lab performs an alternative to a progress/growth-driven world in noticing care and struggle as techniques of maintenance and survival. While many of the disciplines with which we collaborate (and co-laborate) maintain growth-driven ideals, we developed from these encounters a position of caring for assemblages of humans and technologies. Instead of pointing fingers and blaming, we make ourselves accountable for our research and research partners. For example, engineering sciences tend to assume neutrality in their political agony, but at the same time, they call for ethical considerations and studies measuring the social impact of technologies.
We propose situated ethics that are sensitive to local environments and hence cannot be abstract and general, but situated and specific. What is considered “good” depends on the situation it is part of. There is no abstract good deducible from general rules, principles or logic alone. If we keep distancing general rules and ethics from situated practices, the messy, impure and imperfect actions of daily life will always fall through the grids. The lab consists of practices that highlight connectedness and impurity rather than purity and cleanliness.
Our coding is not general, but specific and it is not distanced but dirty. This demands us always being accountable for our coding, to continuously work on it and reconfigure it. What is good, is not printed in this document, but should emerge through its localizing and enactment. What follows is a mixture of small and specific issues and more overall desires and horizons, resonating with how the concrete and the abstract amalgamate in our everyday practice.