Welcome to the Biological Engineering Collaboratory!

While there are many ways that one might be interested in biological engineering from the perspectives of history, philosophy, and science and technology studies (hereafter H/P/STS), and many things that 'biological engineering' might be taken to be, the BEC has emerged thanks to some more specific shared starting assumptions:

1. Two lenses: The H/P/STS of biology can and should be explored more systematically through the lens of the H/P/STS of technology and engineering. We mean this to imply not only that biology can be rethought in terms inspired by work on technology and engineering, but also that future work on technology and engineering could be rethought in terms inspired by work on biology.

2. Unpacking integration: While we acknowledge that there may be times and places where either biology or engineering require something that the other does not, we are nevertheless committed to seeing how far an integrative ambition between the H/P/STS of biology and engineering might take us. 

3. A focus on knowledge: Biological engineering is particularly worthy of study because it comprises meeting places for multiple epistemologies. Potential epistemic implications include, but are not limited to, different ways of investigating and knowing the world, varying politics of knowledge, and the making of multiple material-semiotic assemblages. The work featured in the Collaboratory, though discussing many diverse aspects of biological engineering, will always aim to improve an understanding of knowledge making. That we each explore processes of knowledge making differently is what makes interdisciplinary collaboration across H/P/STS so crucial and fruitful. We also wish to be clear that we are not chauvinistic about what can evidence, constitute or contribute to 'knowledge'. It certainly does not belong only to theory or science. Accordingly, different members might wish to focus on how practices contribute to knowledge, or how non-human organisms are knowledge makers, or perhaps even technical objects. 

4. Symmetry: Our work places particular emphasis on engineering epistemology and accounts of the role of technology in knowledge making, but we do not intend this to be a privileging step. We remain committed to unpacking our cases in the ways that best suit
them, attending symmetrically to the multiple other epistemologies present as best we can, and reaching outside of either merely biology or engineering when the need arises.

5. Actors and analyst categories: Each of us may choose to define biological engineering, what it is and what it's limits are, differently. The need to distinguish between the concepts and categories used by the actors and interlocutors in our studies, and our own analytical categories, is therefore particularly important to us.

These starting points help to give our network coherence and delineates a research agenda that is otherwise quite fragile; biological engineering is prone to collapse, disaggregating into either ‘the biology’ part or ‘the engineering’ part. This agenda should also help prevent mission-creep. We are very aware that there are many different ways to be interested in biological engineering – these happen to be ours, and hopefully yours!