Recherche:OpenLabs/Panel pour l'EASST 2018

Auteurs

Morgan Meyer, Evelyne Lhoste, Luis Felipe Murillo

Titre

Collaboration in/with "open labs": Studying the objects of boundary-making and crossing

Proposition

The question of "participation" is taking the central stage in contemporary STS debates. Beyond the established literature on community science, lay expertise, science communication and technical democracy, we have witnessed a veritable return to questions of public participation with the emergence of new convivial spaces for experimental and collaborative work around (bio)hackerspaces, makerspaces, fablabs, and innovation laboratories.

The importance of these community spaces for STS resides in their ongoing experiments with alternative organizational models, collaborative-competitive arrangements, and degrees of openness to public participation. Assembling new sociotechnical collectives, they hold the promise of providing wider access to science and technology. Yet, they are also the site of insurmountable tensions involving distinctive forms of expertise and ways of knowing at the intersections of markets, publics, and institutional spheres of political action.

In this panel, we propose a focus on the technical objects of open laboratories. The goal is to elaborate a new analytic for the challenges of collaborative production by comparing and contrasting empirical cases across (local, national, regional, and transnational) scales. We will address the ways in which tools and infrastructures are produced and circulated through spaces of experimental work in order to understand how boundaries are established and crossed through collaborative production. We will examine the dynamics of institutionalization "from below" through the collaborative work on shared technical objects and infrastructures.

We welcome contributions addressing the following questions:

- What do "open labs" produce in organizational, material, conceptual, and normative terms?

- What kinds of expectations, promises, futures, and utopias are articulated through their technical objects and practices?

- What kinds of boundary-work are made visible and invisible through processes (as well as the struggle against established forms) of institutionalization?

- How do technical objects and sociotechnical practices collapse and challenge established our spatial analytics --- of the local, global, transnational, and "glocal"?

- For the purposes of collaborative ethnography, how useful are the disputed terms and identifies at work in open labs? (such as "(bio)hacker", "maker", "entrepreneur", and broader rubrics such as "open innovation", "open science", etc.).