About the Lab

ETHOS Lab is a critical feminist methods laboratory dedicated to experimentation at the intersection of digital methods, ethnographic inquiry, and speculative fabulation. We take seriously the Harawayian notion that methods make worlds and so consider reflection and creativity with methods an essential part of our work as investigators of technological worlds and the ways we hope to reshape them through our research practice.

The ETHOS Lab draws upon an interdisciplinary cross-pollination of the fields of STS, Anthropology, and Human Computer Interaction. Overall, we are committed to situated analytics. This means that we aim to inductively understand the ways that technologies are epistemologically and materially located within practices and lifeworlds. It is not only data-centric and computational methods, but also ethnographic methods, that are on the move, traveling, shifting, and imploding relations both within and beyond academic research. We aim to understand how digital and computational methods migrate into humanistic and organizational understandings of social relations. And we experiment with how technologies can extend our modes of inquiry by engaging critically with their worldmaking capacities.

As a feminist lab we are committed to holding open space for discussion of our own working conditions and the maintenance of our selves within and beyond productivity at work. We meet weekly to discuss what is on our desks and minds, convene quarterly for pitch and play meet-ups, and, through our open hours, are available throughout the academic year to spar about potential new projects and collaborations.

About the Space

The lab consists of a physical space, in room 3A30, which offers us a hub for community gathering and creating events that interrupt the dominant tropes of the “Tech University” by conjuring “other-worldliness” in our relations to technology. We work with diverse methods from experimental writing to role play to game design to discover ways to come together in vulnerability and play. The lab also hosts the only physical library at ITU!

The space is also where research and experimentation take shape, these are facilitated by the infrastructures we build, host and maintain. Below is a list of what you will be able to find or get help with at the Ethos Lab.

Research Infrastructures

Hardware

In the space you can find the following machines and hardware

• 3D Printer – PRUSA MK3DS+
• Embroidery Machine – Brother Innovis NV870
• Breadboards, jump cables and arduinos for embodied computing

Software

As the main hub for research on digital methods at ITU, the lab hosts the following no-code tools which allow anyone with experience in humanities or social science to begin work using digital methods.

• 4CAT server + Zeeschuimer – collection/scraping, analysis, and visualization of data
• Pixplot – for clustering of images