In the humanities, we have typically organized research on three different scales: the individual scholar, the project, and the center. The individual scholar is familiar to all of us, since that is the most common mode of knowledge production. As individual scholars, we decide on our own research agenda, go out and collect the necessary data to analyze it, often spend days (or years) in our offices reading and writing, and then publish something (hopefully) in the end. At the project level, you move up to a tightly focused team working on one project. There is a Primary Investigator (PI), associated senior people, and temporary researchers (post-doc and PhD positions). The aim of a project is to answer a clearly defined research question. Typically in Norway, an externally-funded project will end up to be something like 10 million NOK over 4 years. At the Center level, we are talking about much larger initiatives and groups—in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at University of Stavanger (UiS), we have the Lesesenteret, Læringsmiljøsenteret, and the new preschool teacher education center FILIORUM. These can involve dozens of full-time staff and are often run at the level of university departments reporting directly to the faculty.
What I want to discuss here is something that is none of those things. It is the laboratory.
LABORATORIES AS PLACES OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
Laboratories are the primary way that the natural sciences organize research. The laboratory as space and practice has been well studied and characterized by Science and Technology Studies scholars.
Laboratory science, according to philosopher of science Ian Hacking, is a practice that can manipulate the object of study within the confines of the laboratory: the lab can ”study phenomena that seldom or never occur in a pure state before people have brought them under surveillance.”[1] We can think of a laboratory as dwelling place of “enhanced nature” and “enhanced agents”.[2] For example if we consider a physics laboratory, we can think about experiments being performed under very specific conditions in order to get rid of extraneous variables. This control allows the development of theories to deploy: “As a laboratory science matures, it develops a body of types of theory and types of apparatus and types of analysis that are mutually adjusted to each other.”[3] But this makes it sound like everything is under control and predetermined; in reality, “laboratory work is messy, practical, and materially heterogeneous,” as STS scholar John Law has observed.
Importantly for our purposes, a laboratory is relational. Law has commented on understanding laboratories through the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK): “knowledge may be theoretical, but it is also embodied in skills and ways of seeing, and in the relations between people, machines and experimental objects. It is shaped or constructed by human beings who deploy cultural and material tools to solve puzzles.”[4] Critically, Law argues that these things do not create static knowledge or practices. The move to material semiotics reveals that “realities and knowledges are not made but done” – what he calls “continuously enacted”.[5] This means that laboratory practice is geographically and temporally situated.
In order to enact laboratory practices, as I mentioned earlier, laboratories are relational. The relations exist in three types of items used in a laboratory (as identified by Hacking): ideas (various kinds of questions and theories), things (material substance that we investigate or investigate with), and annotation/marks (outcome of the experiment, a written-down thing).[6] What I want to propose is that we in the humanities also use these three types of items and could organize our work in laboratories.
LABORATORIES FOR THE HUMANITIES
The idea of using laboratories as a model of the humanities was first floated in the 1990s. In 1997, the literary scholar Jonathan Arac was highly critical of the “model of intensely individual proprietorship” that had dominated the humanities and advocated “strongly self-defining groups” like laboratories as a future organization.[7] Arac proposed the laboratory as “a place for a collectivity to work” to replace the common individualist mode of humanities knowledge organization that mirrors a shop window, “a place for a collection to be displayed.”[8] In 1999, Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English and Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, argued that humanities should adopt a new and different model for intellectual exchange. Instead of sitting alone in their offices and producing an ethic of individuality, humanities scholars should have laboratories “built around the process of discovery.”[9] According to tenure and dissertation coach Gina Hiatt writing in 2005, the benefits would extend beyond established scholars to graduate students who often end up isolated during the dissertation phase.[10] PhD isolation is a particularly acute problem in a place like UiS where there are relatively few PhD students in each humanities discipline at any given time. Having a community of scholars in which they are embedded through the laboratory holds promise for better integration and results.
Humanities scholars have, however, been very slow on the uptake of the laboratory idea. In fact, in July 2016, the US National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a workshop called “The Humanities Laboratory: Discussions of New Campus Models” to bring together that handful of American universities that had any kind of humanities lab.[11] What was obvious from the list of participants is that digital humanities has been the most significant leader in making laboratories. This makes intuitive sense if the laboratory is thought of as a place to share equipment necessary for the production of knowledge – since often digital humanities laboratories include expensive specialist equipment such as 3D printers, high resolution scanners, and extra-large interactive media screens.
But if we think of laboratories as STS scholars have as a place and a practice – a way of thinking through and about problems with an established toolkit which can be as much mental as physical—then the laboratory model has much greater applicability in the humanities than just a digital makerspace. The items that Hacking discussed as used in a laboratory—ideas (various kinds of questions and theories), things (material substance that we investigate or investigate with), and annotations/marks (outcome of the experiment, a written-down thing)—are all applicable to all humanities. We have research questions and theories, documents and art and oral testimony, and texts and non-texts that we create to explain and capture our processes and outputs. In historical study, we too must bring the phenomena under surveillance in our offices/archives/collections in a pure state that didn’t exist in the past in order to isolate the phenomenon that we wish to explain.
The difference between the individual heroic lone scholar and the lab is the form and place in which our ideas, things, and annotations are created. The lab presents a new innovative mode of teaching, learning, and sharing the craft of humanities.
GREENHOUSE AS A HUMANITIES LABORATORY
Environmental Humanities is one of the fields that is starting to establish research groups on the laboratory model: The Environmental Humanities Lab (KTH, Sweden, https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/ehl), Penn Program in Environmental Humanities Lab (University of Pennsylvania, USA, http://www.ppehlab.org/), Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (UCLA, USA) (https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/lens/), and The SeedBox: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (Linköping Univ, Sweden) (https://theseedbox.se/). Notice the “Collaboratory” in that last one which stresses the collaborative practice of a humanities laboratory. The interdisciplinary nature of environmental humanities encourages collaboration and exchange, but it should not be alone in doing so.
So what does a humanities lab look like? When I and Finn Arne Jørgensen decided to set up The Greenhouse at UiS we consciously modelled it on the lab. We wanted to make a place for scholars to develop common ideas (the questions and theories), to share things (intellectual substances of investigation), and to exchange annotation (their outputs).
The first thing we did was to set up a weekly lunchtime team meeting. The meeting creates a shared time and space without the demands of a set agenda. Instead the idea is to let the meeting be fluid and flexible to meet the needs of the team right then. This follows very much the natural sciences model based on my own personal experience—at the ecology department where I worked in Umeå we had a weekly morning meeting on Tuesdays for everyone in our research group of 20 people to get together to share updates on work and life and Finn Arne had heard the Nobel Prize winner Edward Moser from NTNU discuss his weekly team meetings in a leadership training course given at Umeå University. It is a way of creating a community of practice and ideas. We want to build identity in a lab.
The second part was to set up a culture of intellectual exchange. This is where our monthly speaker series comes in. We are inviting guest speakers from both Norwegian and international universities who can help us as a group explore the possibilities of environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary endeavor. We are actively recruiting international researchers to join the group through exchange programs like the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellowships, the Fulbright exchange program for US scholars, and the Swedish Vetenskapsrådet international postdoc program. We just received funding support for the first two Greenhouse Fellows who will stay with the group for 3-4 weeks in May and June. We are hoping to leverage those programs as a way of bringing expertise into the lab. We are also keen on integrating non-university personnel into the lab—particularly those within the museum and arts sectors—where we believe collaborative ventures have the potential to reach much larger and different audiences.
The third step will be to develop a shared vocabulary and toolset – the materials of doing our laboratory work. We decided to set up a Library as one part of the materials. Books are one of the primary pieces of equipment we have in the humanities, so we mustn’t neglect our tools! To work on our shared vocabulary within the environmental humanities, we are reading and discussing articles by our Greenhouse speakers at the lunchtime meeting before their talk. Because the speakers cover such a wide range of disciplines, we hope that this activity with help familiarize people with discourses from other disciplines.
The humanities laboratory is an innovative approach to research organization. The Greenhouse is not a project with one defined research question and we are not a huge center. Instead, we are a lab with multiple projects and multiple investigators who share ideas, things and annotations. I do not want to make it sound like we are ‘finished’ building our environmental humanities laboratory. In fact, as John Law argued, a laboratory has to be “continuously enacted”, but this is a start to creating a shared space and practice to cultivate environmental humanities.
Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History and Co-founder of the Greenhouse
NOTES
This text was originally prepared in February 2018 as part of a University of Stavanger Department of Cultural Studies & Languages seminar on innovation in university teaching and research.
[1] Ian Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” p. 33 in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (University of Chicago Press, 1992). I note that Hacking excludes “observational, classificatory, or historical” studies from his definition of laboratories (p.33), but I think that this is an unnecessary exclusion as I will discuss later in this article.
[2] Karin Knorr Cetina, “The Couch, The Cathedral, and The Laboratory: On The Relationship Between Experiment and Laboratory in Science in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[3] Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” p.30
[4] John Law, “The Materials of STS,” version of 9th April 2009, p.5, http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law2008MaterialsofSTS.pdf.
[5] Law, “The Materials of STS,” p.6
[6] Hacking, “The Self-Vindication of the Laboratory Sciences,” p.30
[7] Jonathan Arac, “Shop Window or Laboratory: Collection, Collaboration, and the Humanities,” in Politics of Research, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine (Rutgers UP, 1997), 116-126; quotes from p.123 and 125.
[8] Arac, “Shop Window or Laboratory,” p.117
[9] Cathy N. Davidson, “What If Scholars in the Humanities Worked Together, In a Lab?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 1999, https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-If-Scholars-in-the/24009
[10] Gina Hiatt, “We Need HUmanities Labs,” Inside Higher Ed, October 26, 2005. https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/10/26/we-need-humanities-labs
[11] Maxine Joselow, “Labs are for the Humanities Too,” Inside Higher Ed, July 12, 2016. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/12/conference-explores-humanities-labs
