A Glossary of Lab Techniques—Extending The Lab Book

What techniques help to constitute the hybrid lab? What techniques perform and produce the lab’s real and imaginary, active and collective forms of doing, knowing, making, and unmaking?

The final chapter of The Lab Book provides an initial but incomplete catalog of nine techniques: 3D printing, collaborating, collecting, dis/assembling, experimenting, failing, living labs, prototyping, and testing. But what other terms would help to reflect the diverse practices of laboratories around the globe? In order to grow the catalog and help lab communities across the disciplines to reflect their own conditions of knowledge production, we want to to extend the existing glossary.

Starting immediately, we invite all interested scholars to submit proposals for texts of 500–1,000 words on other lab techniques, particularly those relevant to their own lab-based practice. Proposals need only include 2–3 sentences or bullet points explaining what technique you are proposing, how you will write about it in relation to labs, and why it's important. These texts will contribute to an open and collective resource that we hope will enable the production of academic, para-academic, and non-academic knowledge in a wide range of labs. All contributions will be clearly attributed and hosted on the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold platform.

Please contact Lori Emerson lori.emerson@gmail.com, Darren Wershler D.Wershler@concordia.ca, and Jussi Parikka parikka@cc.au.dk with your proposal for a term.