Critical STS scholars have exposed “lab life” as a key arena of agentive relations and as sites of more than technical assemblages (Clark and Fujimura 1992, Traweek 1998). Social scientists have also found the form of “a lab” generative for organizing collaborations and essential to gaining institutional recognition and funding. We seek to move beyond the important work of first generation lab studies that demonstrated the political nature of (bench and social) science to place the studying of labs alongside the establishment of qualitative STS labs– ones that draw on traditional laboratory models yet incorporate alternative frameworks of inclusion and non-extractive epistemologies. Our focus is this dual nature of labs as systems of relations.

Extending Roy’s (2018) incitement for feminist laboratory methods into the work of qualitative labs, we ask two central questions: what makes a qualitative lab a lab, and what are its methods of good relations? Following Liboiron et al. (2017), how do labs relate to, or materialize in, particular methodologies, ethnographic productions and collaborations?

Submissions might address the above through consideration of:
*Alternatives to Latourian-style laboratory studies
*Ethics and praxis of collaborative networks among and between labs, the public and private sectors
*Methodological strategies for analyzing lab collaborations and participating in them
*The role of labs as workplaces and as places of often precarious employment
*Models for building labs, their intersection with other kinds of institutional relations, and especially for those outside R1 institutions,
*The heightened stakes of these conditions in and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic