2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As qualitative researchers embedded in a biomedical engineering department, we are currently attempting to create a space for conversation and action among a self-selecting group of faculty. Framed as a Community Garden, this initiative is focused on supporting discussions and activities around “cultivating care” within labs in the department.

In this paper, we focus on outlining the empirical and theoretical context for this initiative. The Community Garden is part of a larger research project exploring the relationship between control and care in biological engineering. The laboratory is an important and complex site of negotiation between control and care: how do PIs create environments that nurture the development of individual trainees (at multiple career stages) while advancing their own career and research agenda in ways that will satisfy institutional expectations? This is fraught territory, grounded in an academic reward system that prioritizes individual performance. Persistent surveys of STEM trainees struggling with mental health [1, 2] highlight a culture of control linked to meritocratic systems that can prioritize PI career advancement over the well-being of lab members.

This culture is increasingly being challenged, by both trainees and mentors. How might we support lab leaders invested in taking a different approach? How might we empower PIs looking to sustain a lab culture grounded more in care than control? We see this as a non-trivial challenge in light of the systemic forces outlined above. Care can take more work, time, responsiveness and emotional resource than control [3, 4]. The work of care is a gamble that could jeopardize the career progression of PIs in the short-term, but in the longer term might transform lab culture and practice – and perhaps the research that emerges.

Responding to colleagues who are actively working to foster more supportive and caring lab cultures, we are attempting to create a space for faculty in our department to work together to re-imagine their labs through a lens that prioritizes care alongside an appreciation for control. Rather than conceptualizing it as a traditional community of practice, we use the language of a “community garden” with the aim of tethering it to local sociopolitical context, emphasizing the active labor involved in enacting change (gardening is physical work), and fostering a shared, brave and experimental space for grappling with how to grow a different kind of lab.

[1] Hall, S. (2023) A mental health crisis is gripping science – toxic research culture is to blame. Nature 617: 666-668.
[2] Evans, T.M., Bira, L. Gastelum, J.B., Weiss, L.T. & Vandeford, N.L. (2018) Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. Nature Biotechnology 36(3): 282-284.
[3] Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011) Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science 41(1): 85-106.
[4] Wylie, C.D. & Murillo, L.F.R. (2023) Care-fully? The question of “knowledge co-production” in Arctic science. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 9(2): 1-22.