What do you associate with the word laboratory or lab? The various images, imprinted on the minds of many Western readers of fiction—think Mary Shelley and Frankenstein (1818)—or fans of the (mad) scientist depicted over the history of film, oscillating somewhere between genius, God, and gangster, have left a certain taste of unease or discontent, to reference a Freudian title. Didn't COVID-19 arise from a lab, so the controversy goes? But then, didn't the COVID vaccinations also arise from labs?
The LAB Book arrives at an auspicious moment: a worldwide pandemic certainly invites new debates about the cultural politics of laboratories. Importantly, this book invites us to think about and rethink what a lab is, what it can and cannot do, and how we engage with it as a cultural phenomenon of experimentation, knowledge production, and actor or facilitator for creating approaches to our world's complex problems. The authors...
