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Paper short abstract

This session explores ethnographic poetry as a method of knowing with. It examines how poetic form invites affective engagement, invested re-encounters, and shared interpretation – allowing findings to be felt, responded to, and taken up collectively.

Paper long abstract

Creative and arts-based methods are often judged by what new insights they yield. This session asks instead how they enable knowing with, not about, the world. Treating ethnographic poetry as method rather than representation, it explores how poetic form invites affective engagement with inquiry and reshapes how findings are encountered and taken up.

Drawing on STS, feminist and queer methodologies, and ethnographic/erasure poetry (Douglas-Jones 2018; Gugganig & Douglas-Jones 2021; Maynard 2009), I consider how poetic practice unsettles binaries between analysis and affect, intellect and emotion, and researcher and researched. Poetry is approached not as expressive add-on but as analytic condensation that foregrounds proximity, ambiguity, and the labour of interpretation.

Empirically, we focus on interview-based work and poetic re-encounters with participants. Returning with poems rather than transcripts or claims invites affective and interpretive responses, using the poem as shared material for dialogue, disagreement, and resonance.

The session also interrogates the growing pressure to be ‘creative’ in academic contexts. Using ethnographic poetry as a case, we ask how such forms can be protected as ways of knowing with others, rather than becoming tools of flashiness shaped by politics of creative legibility - particularly in STS, where work is continually negotiated against scientific and technological regimes of legitimacy.

Combining brief examples with a participatory exercise, the session treats ethnographic poetry as both method and provocation for resilient, reflexive scholarship.

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Paper short abstract

In this study, a board game is created from 5 years of ethnographic data to understand how interdisciplinary scholars worked on a grant to create cultural change. Playing the game becomes a reflexive site of inquiry & knowledge production leading to a more nuanced conception of how change occurred.

Paper long abstract

How do engineers implement cultural change in an electrical and computer engineering department in response to receiving a National Science Foundation (Revolutionizing Engineering Departments) grant? How do social scientists and engineers work together on an interdisciplinary project over time? To answer these questions, we created a board game from our ethnographic data, called the RED World of Change, played by the project team. We frame this paper as a Science and Technology Studies (STS) practice of making and doing. Where STS emphasizes the social, technical, and material conditions that shape each other, making and doing focuses on the embodied practices of how knowledge is made and unmade. In turn, the game acted as a simulation and reflexive site of inquiry of knowledge expressions, frictions, and travel that occurred for the duration of the grant. Playing the board game allowed the players to reflect on how they worked together and observe the collaborations and limitations of their own work that occurred. The game play was then folded back into our ethnographic field work and analysis. By acting as critical participants, we present an integrated understanding of how cultural change is made when actors are collaborative, self motivated, and stretch beyond the disciplinary boundaries and norms that define their field.

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Paper short abstract

In my contribution, I will approximate the visual coordinates of Muslim fashion images in Germany by the practice of drawing. I will essay a graphic approach to the visuals by elaborating on non-verbal artistic strategies to capture the data as experimental auto-ethnographic method.

Paper long abstract

Relying on my hybrid ethnographic fieldwork on Hijbai fashion creators in Germany, I try to reshape conceptions of media atmospheres, digital imaginaries and fashion images on social media by experimenting with non-verbal auto-ethnographic methods. The conceptual thoughts are confronted with my experimental attempt to capture visual data by drawing methods to propose an innovative path towards investigating not only verbalized data, but also the pictorial vocabulary of Muslim fashion Imaginaries on Instagram. As empirical illustration, I use the example of the abaya to show how text-image-layers are constantly reassembled in social media.

Drawing is an interruption of a routine approach to large-scale image analysis. It can support the researcher in looking more closely and perceiving details, but also points of confusion. To draw, the eye must grasp and trace the paths of the lines. After drawing an image, I see it differently, have a different relationship to its composition and individual elements and even towards the aesthetics associated with it. I have internalized it and thus created a new connection to it. This practice has the potential to situatively withdraw from established bodies of knowledge and decenter our scientific certainties. In this way, drawing offers a more intuitive approach to image analysis and, moreover, allows for a concentration on the visual elements and their interrelationships, which can otherwise easily be overlooked in favor of a sociological affinity for texts.

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Paper short abstract

This presentation weaves spoken poetry and sining to share research on how hygiene infrastructures shape menstrual life in Sweden and Finland. Drawing on interviews and surveys, it centers menstrual substance, everyday washing technologies, and feminist critiques of toilet design.

Paper long abstract

This presentation, weaving spoken poetry and song, showcases research results on how built hygiene environment impacts menstrual life, sharing interview and survey data that showcase the many, differing, ways in which menstruation come into being in differing toilets and bathrooms in Sweden compared to Finland. Persdotter centres the menstrual substance, toilet standards, as well as the many everyday technologies involved in the everyday practicalities of menses. Particularly, she highlights everyday technologies and practices of anogenital washing (bidets, bidet showers, toilets paper, showers, wipes). The presentation rests on sociological and anthropological understandings of dirt as well as key themes from critical menstruation studies. Persdotter particularly draws from sociological work arguing that typical western toilet infrastructures seriously misrecognize the needs of menstruants, as well as from critical architecture scholars that argue typical western toilet design re-produce gendered inequalities in health, well-being, and participation in society, and that they are environmentally resource intensive. The logical question for anyone in feminist STS is off course: How can it be otherwise? Persdotter is the current host of the Society of Menstrual Cycle Research’s biannual menstrual poetry slam, within which the practice of presenting research results through spoken word poetry and signing has been, and continue to be, explored.

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Paper short abstract

What happens when researchers across disciplines combine art and creative writing to reflect on their research? This paper will explore how academics engaged with the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in an experimental interdisciplinary encounter designed to disturb our relationship with ‘research’.

Paper long abstract

What happens when researchers – from environmental sciences, sociology, and politics – engage with creative writing as a way of reflecting on their own research? Ekphrastic writing is a literary device in which a work of visual art is described in detail, going beyond mere description to opening up dialogues between the viewer, the work, its (imagined) creator, and (imagined) audiences. This presentation presents findings from PhD fieldwork, which explores connections between arts-based methods and inter-disciplinary practices within academia. The project responds to calls for more in-depth empirical study of inter-disciplinarity, building upon the work of (e.g.) Sørensen and Traweek (2022) who consider the university as a necessary “homework” for STS scholarship and the field’s interest in epistemic regimes. Whilst inter-disciplinarity continues to be celebrated as a panacea to complex world problems, ambiguities about its purpose and impact persist. Through diverse forms of creative inquiry, I will show how exercises, like ekphrastic writing, gives people something new to know, albeit it in unfamiliar and strange ways. Extending arguments put forth in (e.g.) Solbu’s (2018) ‘physiology of imagined publics’, ekphrastic writing reveals the uncertainties and ambivalences that abound in individuals’ understandings of their research, as participants are invited to explain their work to others via imagined dialogues between characters in Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings. The insights presented here inform how we might better support knowledge-making practices within academia, recognising, like Stengers (2015), that our capacity to think and feel as academics requires help in order that we, too, might be of help.

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Paper short abstract

"Work in Progress" is an interactive exhibition based on ethnographic fieldwork in Swedish home care services. As an epistemic device, it explores care as continually done, undone, and redone under temporal, bodily, and organizational pressure—inviting sensory, situated inquiry.

Paper long abstract

This presentation introduces an interactive exhibition—Work in Progress (Arbete pågår)—currently being developed within an ethnographic research project on home care services in Sweden. Rather than communicating research findings about care, the exhibition aims to create spaces to explore care as continuously done, undone, and redone—under bodily strain, temporal constraints, and organizational pressures. Building on insights from ethnographic fieldwork, it is designed to pose questions about care through situated encounters rather than verbal inquiry.

Using drawings, interface screenshots from digital planning systems, fieldwork objects, and performative interventions, the exhibition will invite visitors to navigate care—from scheduling software to compression stockings—and to sense how time, bodies, smells, and responsibilities are partitioned and coordinated. “Home care” promises to move care into places we already inhabit and know. In practice, the home becomes an ongoing accomplishment that shifts and mutates as bodies age or become ill. Care appears here as sustaining and adapting rather than resolving; it can create, uphold, and postpone, but it cannot ultimately succeed.

Situated within STS and care studies, the installations function as epistemic devices that foreground the unfinished, the uncategorizable, and what falls between institutional categories. In the presentation, I reflect on exhibition-making as a research practice that reworks ethnographic material into spatial, sensory, and participatory formats, extending inquiry beyond what conventional academic writing tends to make explicit. Engagement becomes a method of inquiry, allowing tensions, contradictions, and fragilities in home care to be felt, teased out, and worked with rather than summarized.

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Paper short abstract

This contribution uses visual methodology to explore tensions around intrauterine device (IUD) use. I have written a zine depicting a chapter in the history of IUDs in Sweden. Illustration simplifies and strips away some details, pushes others forward and creates space for different story telling.

Paper long abstract

This contribution uses visual methodology to explore tensions around intrauterine device (IUD) use. I have written a zine depicting a chapter in the history of IUD use in Sweden. An illustrated account simplifies and strips away some details, pushes others forward, and it creates space for different story telling. Illustration also has the potential to bring the history of a contraceptive device used by many, many people back to them.

The zine focuses on the early 1960s when there were significant knowledge gaps in understanding how intrauterine devices worked. In Sweden, IUDs were banned, as earlier legislation classified IUDs as abortifacients and prohibited their use. But in the early 1960s there was excitement about using IUDs. Swedish researchers applied to run clinical trials of IUDs and IUDs were included in foreign family planning efforts, even before the technology was officially permitted in Sweden.

IUDs have been studied as “versatile technologies” – technologies that can be used for both feminist and non-feminist means (Takeshita 2012). They can be used coercively to control births on a population level, or to harm vulnerable populations. To imagine new futures involves knowing what the past has looked like and why – IUD use is not a simple story, but it does clearly show the ways in which we do not want contraceptives to be used. It also reveals that issues we struggle with today – how global power imbalances, ethnicity, class, and gender impact contraceptive accessibility – are not new dilemmas.

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Paper short abstract

Can we do public engagement that hovers between disciplines, views of science, and aesthetic modes, while still being accessible? I will share two short films made to introduce visitors to interdisciplinary exhibitions, arguing that hovering is a creative constraint that can help distil STS visions

Paper long abstract

In this presentation I share two short films that hover between science communication, STS storytelling, and aesthetic play. Made to introduce visitors to interdisciplinary exhibitions 'Mind the Gut' and 'Liquid Bodies' at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, the films could be seen as primarily sharing scientific facts. But the scripts play with the poetics of the factual, drawing on the acoustic flourishes of scientific language to hint at its strangeness. In the tradition of STS approaches to public engagement, the films also layer science with science-in-the-making, science-as-it-really-is, and science-as-imagination. The visuals echo scientific tropes but in evidently abstract or fantastical ways, and the narratives invoke the visitor’s embodied experience alongside anthropomorphised elements, loosening agency from scientistic bounds. In all these domains, the films hover, not coming down to land on one view of science; one view of biology. This is an attempt to mirror the world as seen through an STS lens, following Born & Barry’s “logic of ontology”. The author and colleagues have written elsewhere about this ‘mirroring move’ as driving not just our curatorial practice, but also the processes of collaboration that support it. I therefore also discuss the collaborations behind the films. I share some key moments of hovering – between disciplines, between purposes, or between personal aesthetic preferences – and identify affective and ethical winds that keep them aloft. In conclusion, I argue that trying to preserve these arial uncertainties while caring for accessibility is a creative constraint that can help to distil STS visions.

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Paper short abstract

This is a historiographic reading.

Paper long abstract

This historiographic reading consists of footnotes only.

Footnotes collected from now-classical science studies books.

That is, 1980ies laboratory studies (and their companions).

Some well-known, others less so.

Reshuffled with a single question in mind:

How could a history of science studies look like from below the bottom line?