The concept of boundary-work (Gieryn, 1983), denoting the rhetorical work which variably demarcates science from non-science, has long been a fruitful concept within STS. While its initial theorization neglected the role of power differentials, recent empirical research demonstrates that the performativity of boundary-work depends on positionality (Pereira, 2019). Against this backdrop,
this paper advances a reconceptualization of boundary-work as a matter of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). The now rich body of STS theory proposing to understand researchers’ world-making practices as matters of care highlights that scholarly engagements with technoscientific worlds are inherently fragile and affectively charged. As such, STS concepts, such as boundary-work, are potentially, but never certainly, at the disposal of researchers engaging in activism and politics.
Thinking through boundary-work as a matter of care allows a renewed conceptualization in terms of three central tenets. First, boundary-work can be seen as continually enacting, attuning us to the practice’s continuity, its possibilities for change, and attendant ontological politics. Second, boundary-
work emerges as locally situated, thus directing attention to its embodied situatedness and the imperative to listen to marginalized voices. Lastly, boundary-work becomes affectively charged as it potentially creates and excludes connections, is always steeped in historically grown power relations,
and necessitates response-ability in its enactments.
This renewed concept of boundary-work as a matter of care foregrounds the politics of boundary-work by highlighting the onto-epistemological entanglements (Barad, 2007) into which STS scholars enter, thus providing the basis for a discussion of and reflexivity about them. By rethinking the crucial
STS concept of boundary-work as a matter of care, this paper contributes to discussing and coming to terms with the politics of STS.