{"id":1778,"date":"2018-08-15T08:20:27","date_gmt":"2018-08-15T06:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ethnoserver.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/?p=1778"},"modified":"2018-08-15T08:20:27","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T06:20:27","slug":"renaming-the-lab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/2018\/08\/renaming-the-lab\/","title":{"rendered":"Renaming the lab"},"content":{"rendered":"
Dear Friends of the STS Lab at Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin,\r\n\r\nas you can see, our Lab has renamed itself. It is now the \u2018Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment|Human Relations\u2019.\r\n\r\nWe continue to be committed to science and technology studies and to ethnographic theorising through an open space for work in progress, experiments, \r\ncollaborative writing and peer support. Yet exciting developments at our institutional home - the Institute of European Ethnology - have made the change\r\nnecessary. Firstly, we have appointed with Tahani Nadim and Ignacio Farias two quite brilliant scholars whose research is heavily infused with STS \r\nthinking and who are both very active and visible within EASST. Secondly, other areas such as media anthropology and discussions around postcolonial \r\ntheory are also increasingly intersecting with STS thought.\r\n\r\nSo STS flourishes at Humboldt in different fields of research. Naming one of these fields 'STS Lab' simply does not make sense. While we have been doing\r\na lot of thinking across fields in the past and hope to continue to do so in the future, our respective fields of research and interest also remain distinct. \r\nLabelling therefore needs to occur at the level of themes and fields not perspective:\r\n\r\nLaboratory: Anthropology of Environment|Human Relations<\/strong>\r\n\r\nLaboratory<\/strong>\r\nThe lab was founded in 2004 by Stefan Beck<\/a> and J\u00f6rg Niew\u00f6hner<\/a> as the Collaboratory: Social Anthropology and Life Sciences. It has since continuously shifted,\r\nbut remained true to the idea of co-labor(at)ing with each other and with our various epistemic partners in our fields of research.\r\n\r\nAnthropolog<\/strong>y\r\nWe see our approach within the broad and multi-facetted tradition of social and cultural anthropology, including its German-speaking strand of European Ethnology. \r\nWe have dropped the \u2018social and cultural\u2019 to reference our background in science and technology studies, the material turn and our understanding of \u2018the social\u2019 \r\nas always already entangled with environments, artefacts, infrastructure and bodies.\r\n\r\nEnvironment | Human Relations<\/strong>\r\nHuman-Environment relations or interactions is a term largely occupied by ecological and systemic thinking in the biological and human sciences. While we \r\nco-laborate with these thought styles, we are keen to explore ethnographically how these relations are enacted rather than assuming them within a particular \r\nepistemological position. We also want to emphasise the environment to avoid its reduction to symbol or metaphor. (cf. Niew\u00f6hner & Lock 2018<\/a>)\r\nThe vertical bar \u2018|\u2019 marks our inquiry into an open, dynamic and often ambivalent and excessive relationship. We take our cue here from Stefan Beck\u2019s \r\ninaugural lecture at Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin entitled \u201cNature | Culture: Thoughts on a relational anthropology\u201d<\/a>. \u2018Relations\u2019 summons \r\nelective affinities including Gregory Bateson, Marilyn Strathern, Stefan Beck, Annemarie Mol, to name but a few with a lifelong interest in relentlessly \r\nrelational research and thought.\r\n\r\nOf<\/strong>\r\nWhile we stand on the shoulders of environmental and ecological anthropology as well as cultural ecology, the \u2018of\u2019 emphasises the STS inflection of our \r\nperspective. We study environment|human relations as always already known within situated ecologies of expertise.\r\n\r\n\r\nWe hope you like the new name. If you don\u2019t, don\u2019t update the cache of your internet browser and come along anyway.\r\n\r\nHave a productive and enjoyable summer!\r\n\r\nJ\u00f6rg<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Friends of the STS Lab at Humboldt-Universit\u00e4t zu Berlin, as you can see, our Lab has renamed itself. It is now the \u2018Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment|Human Relations\u2019. We continue to be committed to science and technology studies and to ethnographic theorising through an open space for work in progress, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1778"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1782,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1778\/revisions\/1782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www2.hu-berlin.de\/sts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}