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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. 

Designing ethnographic research on the technoscience workforce according to intersectionality theory presents both opportunities and constraints. On the one hand, the pursuit of justice in technoscience requires attending to differences between scientists who have been disenfranchised from knowledge production due to racism and sexism. On the other hand, sharing the lived experiences of severely underrepresented members of technoscience heightens the risk of harm. I introduce a practice called Sheltering, inspired by the computer science technique of “black boxing” and feminist methodology of “strong objectivity.” The opacity of the shelter in which some data resides is balanced with the transparency of the researcher’s positionality. Combining reflexivity, refusal, and performative design, Sheltering contests dominant norms in science, while minimizing risks of retaliation to collaborators. It also balances communal responsibilities with research integrity. It not only requires consideration for the researcher’s relationship with collaborators, but also attention to power in the worlds they navigate and solidarity in their struggles. Sheltering, a repertoire of care tactics to protest epistemic and social injustice in US knowledge production, can help transform who gets to produce science and reimagine other ways of knowing. 

Collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (STS)and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a growing trend. The papers assembled in thisSpecial Section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. We grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. We take care that knowledge making is political. Race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations.Through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for STS ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.