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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.
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This content will become publicly available on November 12, 2025
Imagining just futures through interdisciplinary pedagogies: cultivating communities of practice across the sciences and humanities
Abstract This case study describes an experimental initiative at James Madison University funded by a National Science Foundation grant in Fall 2021 that aimed to support interdisciplinary collaborative pedagogical development related to Science, Technology, and Society (STS) with a particular focus on ethics and justice. The case study argues that creating infrastructure to cultivate and sustain small teaching communities of practice that include faculty from humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields, can support the challenging and necessary work of developing integrated STS-informed pedagogies across the curriculum. A flexible framework is examined through multiple lenses, including perspectives from each faculty participant, representing teaching departments of Biology, World Languages & Cultures, Integrated Science and Technology/Biotechnology, Justice Studies/Disability Studies, and Integrated Science and Technology/Public Interest Technology and Science. Authors provide key insights about what enables and sustains an interdisciplinary community of practice.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2121207
- PAR ID:
- 10631682
- Publisher / Repository:
- https://www.degruyterbrill.com/
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Integrated Global STEM
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2942-769X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 52 to 60
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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