Everything is a Lab: Doing Ordinary Science

This volume is a scrapbook and an experiment. It collects the artifacts, written and otherwise, of a year’s worth of public workshops that put science and technology studies and affect studies together. Through zinemaking, collaging, foraging, fermenting, perfuming, and walking together, we do ordinary science from the kitchen table and work to materialize alternative futures. Putting STS and affect together bolsters literacies for how the world is being made and how we might make it differently.

Contributors: Mathew Arthur, Debarah Bulford, Lindsey Freeman, Reuben Jentink, Sarah Law 婉雯, Morgaine Lee, Erin Manning, Rowan Melling, Coleman Nye, Hayden Ostrom, Rebecca Peng, Ceall Quinn, Donovan Schaefer, Chad Shomura, Becca Soft, Kathleen Stewart, Amanda Watson.

"The book works as exercises in writing and being together. It registers with care the circulation of practices, techniques, and affects that define the many labs through which we articulate what a community of sensing and thinking is. The book participates in the past years of research addressing labs beyond the strictly scientific, while also thus expanding the very insights into what are the situated spaces and shared affects of knowing and theorizing."

—Jussi Parikka, co-author of The Lab Book

"Taking seriously the proposition that science is ordinary, this dazzling book encourages us to consider how we do and might make worlds with care, courage and imagination. It pushes the boundaries of theory and practice, collecting together experimental writing and write-ups with beautiful images from collaborative workshops, pulling us into the worlds of bees, inviting us to turn ourselves into sensors, providing us with guides to compose new scents and more-than-human substances—and lots more besides. It is a treasure trove of a book, designed to delight and inspire researchers across STS and affect studies."

—Rebecca Coleman, author of Glitterworlds