Practicing care-as-affect and engagement-as-critique: Careful engagement with Video-Reflexive Ethnography and Socio-Technical Integration Research

Ever since the collaborative turn in STS, numerous approaches have been developed that focus on embedding social scholars in professional environments to enhance reflexivity and facilitate the improvement of work practices. While these approaches have sparked discussions on power asymmetries, shifting positionalities, and multiple commitments in collaborative projects, the multivalent affects that shape their outcomes have largely remained unexamined. We study how attending to affects enhances social bonds and contributes to knowledge production in collaborative research. We analyze affectively charged-moments in video-reflexive ethnography and socio-technical integration research through the theoretical lens of careful engagement. Our understanding of careful engagement combines care-as-affect with engagement-as-critique. Drawing on María Puig de la Bellacasa, “caring about” a collaborative project involves affective attachments among collaborators. Sorting out these attachments helps practicing engagement-as-critique. For engagement to take the form of what Helen Verran calls “generative critique,” which is positioned in-between agonistic critique and uncritical subordination, embedded scholars need to feel into the affective fabric of collaborative inquiries. We find that disconcertment and ambivalence helped us navigate our positionality and stimulated changes in thought and action in us and our collaborations. For such discomforting affects to play such a productive role, we engaged in different forms of careful engagement: careful assimilation and careful scrutiny. Our comparative account contributes to discussions on successes and failures of collaborative research in STS by drawing out how the affective dimension of care functions as a resource to productively destabilize taken-for-granted work routines.