An academic lab at ITU is a physical laboratory that seeks to encourage interaction between faculty, students and external stakeholders. There are both research and teaching labs – often combined. A lab has an academic responsible defining the overall aim and purpose of the lab. Additionally, a lab will typically have a lab manager who handles the daily administration.

ETHOS Lab is a critical feminist methods laboratory dedicated to experimentation at the intersection of digital methods, ethnographic inquiry, and speculative fabulation. We take seriously the Harawayian notion that methods make worlds and so consider reflection and creativity with methods an essential part of our work as investigators of technological worlds and the ways we hope to reshape them through our research practice.

The ETHOS Lab draws upon an interdisciplinary cross-pollination of the fields of STS, Anthropology, and Human Computer Interaction. Overall, we are committed to situated analytics. This means that we aim to inductively understand the ways that technologies are epistemologically and materially located within practices and lifeworlds. It is not only data-centric and computational methods, but also ethnographic methods, that are on the move, traveling, shifting, and imploding relations both within and beyond academic research. We aim to understand how digital and computational methods migrate into humanistic and organizational understandings of social relations. And we experiment with how technologies can extend our modes of inquiry by engaging critically with their worldmaking capacities.