We will discuss based on papers that will be circulated beforehand. Please send email to Wakana Suzuki ( wakana.s.kyoto@gmail.com ) to get papers.
 

[abstract]
This workshop aims at exploring and rethinking human and non-human relationship in contemporary scientific laboratories, such as robot engineering or stem cell science. From the 1970s to the 1990s, in STS and Anthropology of science, Laboratory Studies had flourished in Europe and the United States. Many scholars such as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Michael Lynch or Andrew Pickering went to laboratories in order to understand and describe scientific “culture”—what and how scientists do and think. However the Laboratory Studies went out of fashion in the 2000s. Although they succeeded in showing a new perspective that shed light on the practices of science and contributed to the philosophy of science, eventually the interests of anthropologists moved outside of laboratories, to areas such as the intersection of indigenous knowledge, scientific knowledge and capitalism.
 

Recently, laboratory has come into the spotlight again. This revival has emerged from the rise of Multispecies Ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010), because laboratories are exactly the places where human and non-human affect each other, bodily engage, interact, develop and evolve each other. Inspired by STS feminist Donna Haraway, they have focused on entanglements of human and non-human (mainly animals or plants) through bodies and history. Inspired by these new Laboratory Studies, in this workshop, three presenters will have presentations based on their ethnographies. We would like to ask and discuss questions, including: how do we expand the notion of “other species”? What is the possibility or critiques of a new trend of laboratory studies? How we offer new perspectives based on case studies and Japanese notion of inochi, seimei (life) or ikimono（living beings）?

[reference]
Kirksey, S. Eben and Stefan Helmreich (2010), THE EMERGENCE OF MULTISPECIES ETHNOGRAPHY, Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-576
 

For further details contact: Wakana Suzuki ( wakana.s.kyoto@gmail.com )