Team:Sheffield/HumanPractices

For the Sheffield team to have ‘Human Practices’ (HP) as a separate section in our wiki, is perhaps a little misleading. From the outset of our project, the team has held HP to be an integral part of our everyday work both inside and outside of the laboratory in viewing all our activities as inherently human and social activities. This is a position central to the field of science and technology studies (STS) and has provided us with a broad framework through which to reflect upon how the form and direction of our synthetic biology practices have been contingent upon a multitude of heterogeneous sociomaterial factors. 

The ideas have evolved throughout the summer as the team has come up with new ways of doing human practices work within the iGEM model. Having decided on identifying pathogens as our project goal, we deicided that 'identity' could be a guiding theme for our whole project and that our human practices could be a series of experiments in and reflections on the notion of identity within synthetic biology. This concept of identity has been used in a number of ways: first we’ve explored how synthetic biology as a field has been developing an identity for itself, with iGEM being a major contributing factor in the making of that identity; second we’ve looked at how individual teams make their collective identity, with a particular focus on our own team; finally we’ve examined how individuals within a team bring a disciplinary identity with them. We think all of these will be important for thinking about the formation of a new kind of interdisciplinary researcher for a new kind of interdisciplinary field.

Our human practices as parts and devices

To explore these questions we have used some traditional methods from social studies of science and some new methods that we have developed within the iGEM model. We think about these new methods as being human practices parts and devices, which we think future iGEM teams should try and develop, combine and invent in the future. Below you can find a general outline of the human practices activities and outputs of our project.

We’ve produced quite a few outputs, which you can explore below, and the primary report of our human practices projects can be downloaded from the following link.  It synthesises and analyses some of the outputs below and provides a general overview of our human practices work.

A report on ‘Developing Human Practices Devices’

You can see a list of the activities that we’ve undertaken in our human practices here.

And here's a map of the outputs from our human practices parts and devices.