97. Collaborative Knowledge Production: Promises and Pitfalls
Margaux Fisher, margauxfisher; Juwon Lee; Nan Ding;
Knowledge infrastructures and technologies are changing in radical ways through new forms of collective knowledge production (Edwards 2013). These include collaborative scientific workflows, biohacking, open access initiatives, engaged research, and citizen science, all of which affect how knowledge is produced, circulated, embodied, and acted upon at different scales. These changes also raise new questions in STS and anthropological studies of knowledge: How might collaborative knowledge-making and the democratization of data and expertise contribute to the formation of ecological solidarities? How might these processes create new ways of being attentive to problems of polluted, colonized, and militarized ecologies? Conversely, what violences or recolonizing processes might collaborative, participatory, and civic knowledge production reify? Approaching these changes as carrying potential for both goods and harms, we invite panelists to consider the commitments and contributions that STS and anthropology researchers might make as participants in processes of collective knowledge production (Marcus 1999). This panel welcomes papers that engage with the affective, temporal, civic, and embodied dimensions of collaborative and democratized knowledge production. Additionally, we encourage submissions that approach knowledge production both as an object of study and a methodological mode of engagement, taking inspiration from previous work on collaboration and experimentation (Fortun 2021, Boyer and Marcus 2021).
