Collaborative Ethnography and Matters of Care in Counterspaces

Abstract

This paper offers a reflexive analysis of an interdisciplinary and cross-race collaboration to advance equity in engineering called LATTICE (Launching Academics on the Tenure-Track: an Intentional Community in Engineering). We engage two bodies of scholarship—matters of care in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and critical race theory on counterspaces—to theorize on the data infrastructure and narrative practices that we developed when applying critical methodologies to collective action in technoscience. We discuss how our care practices conflicted with traditional ethnographic practices and thus, inspired us to innovate on methods. These methods—member-checking and polyvocal memo-ing—make transgressing the boundaries of LATTICE counterspaces for public dissemination possible by invoking caring as praxis. We conclude that using these methods to discuss the contradictions and challenges in STS collaborations is an opportunity for advancing mutual intelligibility among interdisciplinary scholars and a politics of knowledge production grounded in values of care and friendship that may contribute to equity and justice in technoscience.