What happens if we take Barad’s call for ethico-onto-epistemology seriously? How can we perform STS ‘by Other Means’, open the black box of ethnographies, and participate in their performative enactment more reflexively and creatively? Paper presentation and discussion facilitated by a respondent.

STS has a strong history of reflecting on the epistemic practices of others. Yet, in spite of a strong methodological focus, STS scholars often only partially consider the performative conditions of their own research practices—not always acknowledging that their own epistemic practices are not merely ‘capturing’ the world, but rather enacting it. As Barad (2007) argues ‘”each of us” is part of the intra-active ongoing articulation of the world in its differential mattering’ (p.381). Through our methods we make particular cuts and we need to acknowledge that these cuts are performative, and that other cuts are possible. How we practice our research is constitutive of what becomes enacted as knowledge (Whitehead, 1978). This has important ontological and ethical implications. Barad asks us to consider an ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ which appreciates this intertwining of ethics, knowing and becoming.

We invite empirical or theoretical papers relating (but not limited) to the following themes:

● The performative conditions of methods and methodology in STS;

● Production and entanglement of subjects and objects through methods;

● The performativity of ethnographic work (also, reconsidering ethnographic work in terms of alternatives such as autoethnography or digital ethnography). What does doing ethnography differently enact, and why does it matter?

● Ethical, policy, practice and dissemination implications of the performativity of epistemic practices;

● How and what do epistemic practices such as participant observation, interviewing, transcribing, coding, and qualitative analysis enact, and why does it matter?

● What do enactments of epistemic practices offer in relation to everyday practices?