Paper short abstract:

STS making and doing builds on linked practices of engagement and reflexivity by calling attention to the two-way–or multiple-way–travels of knowledge production and expression. What are the return flows–the normative and conceptual learning–that making and doing activities generate?

Paper long abstract:

STS making and doing involves a wide range of emerging scholarly activities that turn STS lessons about the non-linearity of knowledge production, expression, and travel, and about the strength of material agency, onto STS engagements. Our involvement in the practices we study is not a unidirectional process of bringing STS insights into an otherwise conceptually deficient world. It rather produces an experimental setup that allows us to find out more about our scholarly/normative commitments, about the practice we want to study, and about how these interrelate. If STS notions, such as 'construction', 'translation', and 'co-production,' apply equally to our own scholarly work, making and doing initiatives can produce some tangible lessons for STS - in terms of both our concepts and our normativities.

In this paper we review a range of STS making and doing activities, including those presented during the 2015 4S meeting during the Making and Doing Program. We study their elements and ecological dimensions to address the ruptures such initiatives produce. Such ruptures change the empirical domain as well as STS understandings, conceptually and normatively alike. How do different approaches to STS making and doing deal with ruptures, controversies, and, sometimes, successes? What are we learning from them? And how do scholars string together engagements with reflexive learning?