Lab in Residence: Collaboratory in Feminist and Social Justice Science Methods

Kalindi Vora
Ethnic Studies
UC Davis

Participants

This lab in residence addresses the lack of venues for creating and hosting conversations between researchers who seek to conduct research in the public interest and stakeholders in that research. We also need space to practice these conversations and research methods. Spaces for ongoing engagements between those who practice humanistic critique and speculation on the topic of technoscience, and technical practitioners like physicians, natural science researchers, and engineers, are difficult to justify on university campuses, where labs are imagined around equipment and technology that are highly specific to discipline. Yet labs are spaces where people can sit down together and create a shared sense of research problem based on a common set of skills and training are a successful model for interdisciplinary inquiry. Our culture lab will rework the workshops of technology by gathering resources to plan and troubleshoot a functional model for a “feminist science shop.” The feminist science shop is a space for working out feminist approaches to building communities around material and political problems. Working together, scholars, artists, activists, and others will form relationships, imagine frameworks, and build tools to work towards a more just politics of knowledge production.