Helen: Weekly Reflection on Becoming a Scientist

The readings for this week describe the processes through which individuals are trained into scientists by undergoing a transformative process at the end of which they see and understand the world in a way specific to that community of scientists. All three authors engage in ethnographic research, observing those scientists in question and interviewing them about their own experiences - and also analyzing the rhetoric of a textbook. Sharon Traweek analyzes the stages of a physicist's journey to becoming a fully-fledged member of the physics community. She focuses both on the ways in which behaviors and emotional responses are cultivated during 15 years of training and the ways that gender has been constructed. Hugh Gusterson narrates his own story working with a nuclear weapons specialist, Sylvia. In unpacking his own biases, he unpacks the world view of a person who creates an object with potential for total destruction. He begins to think about the laboratory itself as a site of resocialization through which thoughts and beliefs are oriented in a different way. Byron Good examines the training of medical students - their sight, writing and speech - to illustrate the symbolic construction of medicine. The combination of physical and symbolic construction of sickness and health reflect our own cultural values and morality. These authors are working to convince us that scientists are social actors who form communities with norms and morals. Science itself is a symbolic construction of our cultural beliefs; science is not an absolute truth and knowledge is subject to social construction. 

I was convinced by their claims that science is social, especially because they took the time to unpack the development of these world views. I wonder why these communities are they way they are, especially concerning gender. What are the processes - prior to college education - that have contributed to the male domination of certain scientific fields?  It is interesting that these communities are treated considered separate from the wider society; but, perhaps the point is that occupational environments create spaces for frames of thought that deviated from the "mainstream". Thinking of science in this manner forces us to question what we think of as truth - knowledge that is in no way fallible. Every scientist is a cultural being, who enters into a smaller community that has a specific subculture. People are not just born scientists and there is not one understanding of the natural world.