Sarah Klein, University of California, San Diego;
Yelena Gluzman, University of California, San Diego

Denver 2015: Open

STS seems to be moving toward a collaborative turn as scholars increasingly recognize that a critical engagement with scientific practice need not be an oppositional one. While scientists and their daily practices are the objects of our research, how might we do the difficult work of including them as interlocutors? We suggest that the site of experiment can provide one opportunity.

Collaborative experiments are opportunities for STS scholars and scientists to engage the empirical outside of our usual disciplinary constraints. These interventions can function as sites where divergent investigative approaches can become visible, actionable, manipulable, and theoretically viable to each other. In other words, we pursue experimental situations that can materialize and entwine divergent concerns, priorities, subjects and objects. With these goals in mind, we design empirical structures (experiments) that involve scientists’ participation, as co-designers, subjects, and/or co-interpreters. At 4S in Denver, we will demonstrate two such collaborative experiments made for the cognitive science lab.