“Naming” as a Lab Technique (The Lab Book)

Naming

Mél Hogan and Andrea Zeffiro, Environmental Media Lab

As it turns out, naming a lab is a complicated and committed responsibility towards a field of knowledge, which is both encapsulated and claimed in and through the act of naming itself. Naming a lab is at once a gesture of branding and self-promotion, it edifies a politic, claims an intellectual space, and orients praxis. In media studies, the arts and humanities, naming a lab takes on extra meaning as it works to both situate and grasp at an emergent field, to help anchor it. Naming materializes the intellectual and emotional labour that goes into building research capacity… [read more]