This editorial describes the crucial role of building transnationally diverse STS communities that our Editorial Collective (EC) has imagined and sought to implement for Engaging Science, Technology, and Society (ESTS). Community-building as an ethic characterizes all aspects of our EC’s work: from editorial practices to infrastructural development, and from content publication to the broader initiatives that we undertake. In a context where the role of scholarly journals is increasingly instrumentalized through corporate-led valuation systems that effectively also render them largely inaccessible, we see this as an especially important value to affirm in and through strengthening open access publication.
Dubbed Silicon Savannah, Nairobi has become a hot spot of tech development that promises to “save Africa.” Qualitative research—carried out by a tangle of private, academic, and non-profit organizations—is part of the work, promising to reveal how people in Kenya are building and benefiting from a dazzling array of digital products. Amidst the enthusiasm, longstanding problems with ways in which research data in Nairobi is conceived, collected, and shared are easily glossed over. This article advances thinking about the politics of qualitative data, unraveling normative concepts like ethics and transparency by both examining existing data practices and modeling alternatives. I describe the sociotechnical infrastructure underlying the ethnographic project, detailing tactics for deploying an instance of open source software—the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)—to draw research interlocutors into collaborative effort to understand and build decolonized qualitative data infrastructures. Through such processes I learned that collaborating on data not only refreshes the social contract of qualitative work; it can also enhance its robustness and validity. I advise scholars to better document our own knowing practices in order to attend to the inevitability of margins created through all data practices, including our own
In this editorial, the ESTS editorial collective (EC) reports on various events it had organized at the 2022 ESOCITE/4S joint meeting held at the Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla in Cholula, México. The EC hosted a journal “happy hour” meet-up and several roundtables on the “Politics of Language,” the challenges and opportunities for open research data in STS worlds, as well as a Managing Editor (ME) Roundtable collaborating with other OA journals. The EC also participated in a two-day pre-conference writing workshop for early-career researchers. Various events organized further the EC’s commitment to cultivating and supporting the development of transnational STS.
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