We began this class by looking at some articles that people posted on the class blog, then moved into discussing the upcoming paper and who people were thinking about interviewing/which lab they were observing, and finally we discussed the class readings.
- looking at the class blog:
- reflecting on last week’s class, Helen found several articles discussing the gendered norms in science. “Why Is Science So Straight?” and an article that discussed a way to increase number of black males in STEM scientists
- STEM scientists are very heteronormative and there really isn’t a small for LGBT people in the field
- “Why Is Science So Straight?” - opinion space that ends with the argument that we need to stop compartmentalizing scientists’ lives so much. unwelcoming environment for LGBT, LGBT scientists are not fully included. not excluded, but not fully included
- do people keep their personal lives out of their science to seem more objective?
- people are pretending that there’s nothing there for sake of objectivity (like Traweek) but we need to be more like Gusterson and acknowledge our biases and what we bring to science
- may not be fundamental to science, and just fundamental to some labs → a lot of lab work is really boring and you are just sitting around, so what do they talk about? do they talk about personal lives or soccer matches, or what? important thing to take into account when think about lab work and lab cultures
- do programs to increase minorities actually work? or do they reinforce stereotypes and do the exact opposite of their intent?
- unintended consequences: don’t want to have only white males in research, but they reify racial categories by assigning people to their racial groups
- changing Psychology department to Psychological and Brain Sciences
- is this just a trendy name to make it more “scientific” or if this is where psychology is headed
- what happens when foreground the biological sciences? because psychology is more the interplay of environment and biology
- is this aspiration or what is it?
- why brain sciences and not neuroscience? neuroscience -- nervous system and spinal cord and everything
- moves it from social sciences into more scientific fields
- curious how the department will change in the future - will paradigm of the department shift, will requirements shift
- what did non-biological psychology professors think of this name shift?
- how will experiments and labs changing?
- psychiatry has similarly gone through this
- now psychiatrists don’t do any of the talk therapy really, just focus on the biological basis and prescribing medications
- Instagram: The New Political War Room?
- political attack ads have started to move to instagram
- social media starts on a very personal level - share about your life and connect with other people about their lives, but then it shifts to a larger soapbox for you to talk about whatever you want to whoever will listen
- social media helps these political proponents (and just everyone) have these two different personas - the public persona where they try to be politically correct and not offend anyone, and the twitter/instagram persona where they are sarcastic and offend anyone
- instagram is the “new facebook.” facebook is for old people
- audience also impacts why snarky responses are appropriate on twitter and not in a democratic convention
- politicians can be snarkier on twitter because faceless and we can’t know for sure that Hillary Clinton or whoever was the one who said that, not an intern
- people are used to the fact that you can be less politically correct and more straight forward on social media
- politicians can build off popular culture
- know that audience won’t be offended and so they become insular within the community
- political attack ads used to be on tv, but younger generations aren’t watching tv, so need to still be hitting that audience and social media is where they can do that
- Conducting Ethnographic Fieldwork
- ethnography is both the process and the product
- almost a requirement to disclose your biases and how you’re situation within the research
- participant observation really does make a difference
- emic - the insider’s point of view; etic - the outsider’s point of view
- how do people see themselves? what theories and explanations do they come up with themselves? and then the researcher can have theories and explanations as to why they do what they do
- objectivity - can you ever have true objectivity in anything? you are engaging with the world with your own particular lens. try to be reflexive and think about how your own viewpoint can affect the research and how that helps/hinders how you see things from their point of view
- triangulation - you use multiple types of data (observations, readings, interviews, etc.). if they all confer and come to the same conclusion, it’ll make your conclusion stronger but if they don’t all agree, why is that so?
- Latour article
- one of the most well known authors in this field. calls himself “anthropologist of science” but trained as philosophy
- his article from last week was trying to be the first account of the detailed days of scientists in their natural habitats
- how to activities inside the lab relate to questions outside the lab?
- why do we care?
- one of the most prominent theoriest in the field of science and technology
- came up with theory that focuses on relationships and actor-network interactions
- context and content are not extinct, mutual products of these networks
- how did he restructure France so his theories could target this problem?
- move 1 - capturing other’s interests, problematizes disease and defines what it could be, moved lab out into the field and transform local knowledge from farmers into useful knowledge for his lab
- move 2 - leveraging a weak point into a strong one (pg. 154) - key step for making his lab. basically now everyone has to pass through his lab to solve this problem.
- obligatory passage point
- fulcrum for trying to understand problems and microbes
- lab becomes more powerful
- move 3 - use that leverage to change the world
- we know live in a Pasteurized world
- uses metaphor of railroad - scientific facts are like trains, they work on the tracks and you can build them longer and connect them but will not work without tracks (pg. 155)
- inside/outside dichotomy not important b/c lab extends itself outside of the labs’ walls
- his theories wouldn’t work if outside world wouldn’t change itself
- making the outside world more and more like the lab
- mistakes and failures are not okay but it is also an important part of the scientific process
- but we just see the perfect published part
- very focused on scientific knowledge construction and how it is spread
- really critiqued for ignoring race and what not
- Knorr-Cetina article
- sociologist by training
- what is a laboratory?
- 3 features that laboratory sciences can ignore
- where it is, when it is, and as it is
- the enculturation of a natural object - you can take an object completely out of it’s environment and natural orders and bring it into the lab
- laboratories allow you to bring these natural processes into a new space where they are subjected only to the rules o the laboratory
- how lab scientists are subjecting these objects to new social overhaul - subjecting them to a new environment
- can manipulate and isolate them
- but what is this telling us about an object when it is in the world and not apart from all these other factors?
- epistemic cultures - how do we know what we know? how does this particular field come up with this knowledge?
- e.g. medical sciences
- shift of patient going to hospital when sick instead of doctor going to house changes power dynamic - immediately with this doctor has more expertise and knowledge that patient is not privy too. plus colleagues right there at the hospital to back up another doctor
- social construction of reality
- particle physicists - creating virtual mockups to study (e.g. Haley’s comet)
- reconfiguring their objects of study
- representation of the object becomes the object of study
- molecular biologists study the tinkering of objects
- social sciences study correspondences. study an environment that corresponds to the real world
- lab staging real world phenomena and replicating lab conditions out in the real world so microorganisms functioned properly
- thinking about what role scientists play
- laboratories are not just spaces that house experiments and scientific research. they are processes that create new conditions for the objects to behave in
- “newly emerging order” that changes knowledge
- labs are making knowledge and power dynamics
- used a lot of Latour’s framework to frame her argument. how does her argument differ from his?
- Latour more focused on the Actor-Network theory and how the network shapes the reality
- she focuses on how manipulating the object in the lab shapes reality
- Fullwiley article
- cultural anthropologist at Stanford
- wrote a book on the encultured gene, about sickle cell in Senegal
- wrote article on race
- looking at molecularization of race
- race itself is becoming revived as a biological entity for research
- more genetic variation w/in a race than between races
- is there some genetic component to race or are we really talking about some social and historical component that shapes race?
- now looking for biological basis for these races that have been social decided and constructed
- some really interesting studies done with Native Americans and proving membership in a tribe
- used to have to use historical documents to prove, but now trying to prove with biology
- Anthropology of Microbes
- collaboration between Jeff Gordon (here at Wash U in anthropology dept) and two NYU grad students who wanted to do lab ethnography of his microbe lab
- study of microbes can displace a lot of these social interactions and the social part of the interactions. discounting a lot of what comes out of the social interactions and chalking it up that you can boil everything down to the microbes. what role to the human beings play?
- important to take into account the role of objects and the importance of those
- talk about overhauling kinship relations
- Mapping the Field of Science and Technology Studies - handout
- nebulus field who are studying science but from a more social perspective
- philosophy of science vs. social studies of science
- social studies of science is what we are more concerned with
- those who make descriptive and empirical studies of what science is and does on a daily basis
- what we are looking at today is laboratory studies and the construction of scientific facts
- Latour definitely falls into this
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