Grassroots scientific research and keeping open hardware open

Image Credit: BabyLegs by Max Liboiron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 

A thematic issue of ‘Engaging Science, Technology, and Society’ journal introduced by GOSH 2017 co-organiser Max Liboiron, Sara Wylie and Nick Shapiro has a range of Open Access articles that ‘work towards remaking how knowledge is made about and across industrial systems by networking community grounded approaches for accounting for environmental health issues created by the fossil fuels and allied petrochemical industries’.

This includes as account of how Max attempted to keep her BabyLegs DIY monitoring tool for plastic pollution open source. Many will recognise BabyLegs from Max’s GOSH 2017 pivot talk!

Read the full special edition here >>

Making and Doing Politics Through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries

The concept of agency is ubiquitous in STS, particularly regarding cases of alternative ways of knowing and doing science such as civic, citizen, and feminist sciences, among others. Yet the focus on agency often glosses over the constraints placed on agents, particularly within asymmetrical power relations. This article follows the case of BabyLegs, a do-it-yourself monitoring tool for marine microplastic pollution, and the attempt to keep the technology open source within an intellectual property (IP) system set up to privatize it. The tactics used to design BabyLegs as a feminine, silly, doll-tool to discredit the device in the eyes of an IP system that valued traditional gender roles lead to the eventual success of keeping the device open source. Yet, those same tactics also reinforced and reproduced the structures of power and essentialism they were designed to resist. I characterize this technological ambivalence as compromise, and argue that all agency exercised within asymmetrical power relations is compromised. This is not to say resistance is futile, but that agency is never pure, and this recognition lets us be more intentional in how we might compromise as practitioners of diverse scientific knowledges.