The Lab Book is out!
I am very happy that our co-authored The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies is out. Written with Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler, the book stems from research that started around 2015 and investigates the changing status of the lab as it features especially outside the fields of science and engineering. The mushrooming of labs of all sorts – and not all only academic, as many coffee labs, brew labs, and hair labs testify – has resulted in a situation we refer to as the hybrid lab. The many aspects that make up the hybrid lab are captured in this diagram on the extended lab, a model that also guides our book’s chapters
We are also grateful for the several dialogues, interviews, and other help that several people affiliated directly or indirectly with labs provided. We were able to test our ideas and get really important feedback from so many different lab setups that also showed the many scales of labs. Some of the interviews are available on University of Minnesota Press’ Manifold platform.
Do get in touch with any queries, review copy requests, or alike.
“Lively, timely, and filled with vivid examples, The Lab Book is a highly readable and critically sophisticated account of current lab culture. Written by three distinguished practitioners, it examines the rhetoric that links real and imaginary ideas of experimentality with systems of power and authority across a surprising range of disciplines. A fun, smart, useful guide to ongoing work in media studies.”
— Johanna Drucker, author of Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display
“The Lab Book makes an extremely important contribution to contemporary discourse about the production of knowledge. In many ways, it is the most important book on the topic since the laboratory studies of Bruno Latour in its potential reach across disciplines and methodologies. Its careful close reading of images and quoted material is particularly compelling, and the writing style is accessible and clear, even while explaining somewhat arcane topics in science studies around infrastructures, apparatuses, ideologies, and assemblages.”
— Elizabeth Losh, author of Hashtag
Machinology 