Ideas for ethnographic fieldwork, Jan 31

I want to conduct my ethnographic fieldwork at the BME lab at WashU where I used to work as an undergraduate researcher. The lab is interested in both understanding biological neural systems scientifically and creating related engineering applications. One question I am curious about is how my colleagues at the lab feel about the value of their research, and if this assessment depends on whether they are working on scientific or engineering problems. Secondly, a research project in the lab can usually be broken down into different tasks, such as behavioral experiments, neural data recording, data analysis and computational modeling. I am interested in how much effort our lab members put into each of these tasks and how they feel about the values of these tasks respectively as components of the project. Thirdly, I also want to study the relationship between the goal of achieving scientific understanding and the goal of obtaining publishable results as demonstrated in the research work in our lab.

I would love to hear about any suggestions or comments.

Rapporteur Notes - 1/27/2017

We began by talking about the blog itself. As it stands, this blog is publicly viewable, but not publicly searchable. Professor Song would like to know if any of us feel strongly enough about the settings of the blog, and we’ve been invited to discuss the following in the comments below.

-          Does anyone want the blog to be public or private?

-          Does anyone want the blog to be publicly searchable (e.g. Google) or not?

-          If anyone would like to use a pseudonym, they may. (Do let Professor Song know if this is the case.)

Of the two class projects, our laboratory ethnography is the first and we will work on it in a series of stages.

• February 10, we will need to turn in an excerpt of our research notes.
• By the end of February, we’ll turn in a rough draft.
• The rough draft will be double-blind peer review.
• The final draft will be due after Spring Break.

As we talk about how one becomes a scientist, Professor Song found it important for us to think about how we become ethnographers. Along with a crash-course in ethnographic research handout, we briefly described things to keep in mind.

• What counts as “a lab?” Obviously, wet labs and psych labs are clear examples, but chemistry labs, primatology labs, and biomarkers labs count, too. When in doubt, ask Professor Song.
• What kind of research question should be asked? Think about social relationships, occupational training or trajectory, gender issues, and so on. Keep in mind, whatever you decide today may change once you start your research, so be open and flexible.
• What about research permission? This research project is not intended to be published, so it’s not necessary to go through institutional review. You should, however, still be cognizant of research ethics. Ask permission from a lab PI before beginning research in the lab. Also, if you intend to do research in your own lab, be reflexive about your role in that lab and what you bring with you into your ethnographic research.

Class discussion was facilitated by three readings and thinking about the situated knowledges of their authors:

Good, Byron. 1994. “How Medicine Constructs its Objects”. In Medicine, Rationality, and Experience. Pp. 65–87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 1992. “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab: Culture, Tradition, and Change in the House of the Bomb”. The Sciences. 32(3):16–22.

Traweek, Sharon. 1988. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics”. In Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists. Pp. 74–104. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Broadly, we explored questions about how scientists become specialists, how they learn, and how they become specialists by learning to construct their worlds. We began with medical students and made some key conclusions:

•         Medical students learn through the construction of a world in which the body is seen objectively. Objectivity is the basis of facts, and the ability to see objectively (thereby deriving facts) is the basis of expertise. So long as all of these components go unchallenged, expertise translates into moral superiority.
•         Byron Good, despite his critique contra Foucault, engages in a similar kind of discourse analysis, but it might have benefitted from a more textured literary analysis. This is particularly relevant as we think about the interface between medical jargon and patient narratives.
•         Good’s research participants were students in a gross anatomy lab, so their learning experience begins with patients who literally cannot talk back, they are essentially the most compliant and docile form of patient that one can have.
•         Students can have different kinds of rituals when approaching the cadavers, but they all have rituals of some sort.
•         The culture of pre-medical students is one of stress and stress about not being stressed – but then that might just be capitalism.

We found Gusterson’s work in/with a nuclear weapons lab provocative because of his background as an anti-nuclear proliferation activist, but also because of the secrecy that surrounds the work in the lab. How might Gusterson’s biases (or situated knowledges) show through his own work, we wondered. We used his work to think about what makes weapons scientists “true believers” in nuclear deterrence, but could not decide whether they were naïve or if their naiveté was a product of the author’s biases. We concluded that Gusterson’s work demonstrates the ways in which scientific discourse can reveal mechanisms of material power and social relations.

Finally, Traweek’s work was described along three axes: the occupational trajectory of the particle physicist, gender (and identity) in the particle physics community, and writing and representation in ethnography. We chose to focus on gender foremost asking if we believed that gender disparity might be better today that in the late 1980s (when Traweek did the research for this book). We also hinted at a discussion about race, but never fully engaged it. Finally, we turned the lens inward, and asked similar questions about anthropology and the social sciences more broadly.

We concluded with a brief philosophical discussion about the relationship between anthropology and science, and interpretive versus predictive frameworks. We decided that there must be disciplines that combine “the two cultures” (referencing C.P. Snow) like, for instance, social epidemiology. Finally, we voiced anxieties about challenging the doxa of science to the extent that we inadvertently legitimate “alt-facts.”

Politics of Social Media

I remember when I got my first social media account. It was Facebook, and I was fourteen. I would go online pretty frequently, especially at the beginning. I would chat with all my friends and comment and like pictures--when I look back on it, I find it interesting that I took so much of my time after school just perusing through the site. Even now, I find my time on Facebook to be mindless and not even fun, just more of a compulsion. The enticing ability to log on to a platform where I can learn and look at things about other people is interesting and unlike anything else, especially for people using social media for the first time.

At some point recently, though, there has been a shift in my Facebook feed content. Instead of it consisting solely of photos and statuses by my friends about their lives, it has become political. I attribute that mostly to the political and divided state we as a country are in right now. Suddenly, all I see on Facebook are news articles. In a lot of ways, it's been good for me. I get exposed to different news stories and become more aware just by being on Facebook and clicking through different articles shared by my friends. In other ways, I think it can be bad. The Facebook comment section is often a breeding ground for unproductive and unhealthy debates that end in name calling and upset people. Conversely, I've noticed the one-sidedness in my Facebook newsfeed. It seems like everyone I'm friends with shares the same articles, argues the same things, and votes for the same people. That can be rather dangerous, because it convinces me I live in a bubble. It can also provide a space in the Facebook comments to be an echo chamber, where, once again, nothing productive is accomplished.

Social media is an interesting form of news, and I struggle to even say that it is a "form of news." With our new President, Donald Trump, it seems like more and more Twitter is becoming a news source. Unfortunately, social media can be a place where lies get spread quickly, as people oftentimes don't corroborate what they read. I know I don't all too often.

Becoming A Scientist: Reading Reflections

The three assigned texts this week detailed various arcs of scientific training and cultural transmission. The texts delved into the acculturation processes scientists undergo throughout their paths to obtain qualifications in their fields. Such processes include not only teaching relevant subject material, but also transmitting the norms and behaviors meant to be reproduced between scientists in a given field.

In her chapter, “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics,” author Sharon Traweek explains how various stages of a particle physicist’s education could lead them to take on gendered views of the field. This begins in undergraduate years, during which time historical (male) heroes of the field are lauded throughout textbooks. Later in training, Traweek argues that various fears motivate appropriate behavior for students: fear of appearing unqualified prevents question-asking, and fear of falling behind leads to a hurriedness to establish one’s own reputation. I found it particularly interesting when Traweek noted the tendency of high-achieving scientists to equate their fields of study to a female love object.

In Good’s analysis, “How medicine constructs its objects,” he argues that illness is not purely biological, but involves a level of existential, human suffering that it is essential for medical students to conceptualize. As a medical anthropology professor, he teaches this lesson, however feels it is at odds with the majority of conventional American medical training, which he argues objectifies and detaches the human body from the lived experience of human suffering.

In “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab” Gusterson reviews the history and conducts interviews at the Livermore Lab, established by the US government as a response to the intensifying Korean War. Gusterson expects the people he talks to will be motivated by patriotism and conflicted about the moral implications of their work; instead he finds they are motivated by the relaxed atmosphere and consider nuclear development morally unproblematic as it is designed to save lives. One thing that stood out to me about Gusterson’s interviews was the observation that moral contemplation took place privately, not among colleagues. 

I think all three authors did well to acknowledge the cultural forces impacting their areas of investigation. The angle proved interesting as scientists featured in all three scenarios positioned themselves or their fields as above (or not beholden to) culture.  Approaching this notion critically is essential, not because cultural forces are detrimental to science as is sometimes implied, but because their presence helps clarify the purpose of scientific work beyond “science for the sake of science.”

what does it take and what does it mean to become a scientist

   When comes to the requirement to participate the scientists’ march on Washington, the only requirement on the organizing website is "Anyone who believes in empirical science".  “Believing in empirical science” enables you to join this politicalized scientists’ gathering but definitely cannot guarantee that you become a scientist, based on this week’s readings. To become a scientist, you have to learn and practice socially constructed knowledge gradually through particular academic training that are divided into different stages which also serve as societal embodiments. Traweek and Good illustrate the disciplinary differences on the one hand in terms of the framing of knowledge but show the similarities between becoming a doctor and a physicist in terms of enduring or taking advantage of the political-economic relationship embodied in the field.

Good regards medicine as “a formative process” (60) “a medium of experience”(86).  This “symbolic formation” (70), is gradually achieved by authorized formative activities including the medical gaze, conversation, and writing of the patient’s medical history, during which patient is both an object and a project of medical practice. I like Good’s interpretation of write up that it is a formative practice which involves with conventionality and arbitrariness and empowers students or physicians to develop conversations with patients and finally construct the patient, contracting the conversations between the doctor and the female patient in The Woman Beneath the Skin. And this formative way of write up just came out within a century in terms of the narrative and the use of phrases.

Traweek presents a descriptive piece of how to become an American particle physicist. The processes and stages in his article, however, look-alike those in other subjects even like humanities, which of course indicates that all the disciplines are regulated in a scientific way, to some extent. Two parts in Traweek’s article drew my attention, the Koza in Japan and the impact of gendered narrative within scientists.    

Gusterson successfully destroys all the stereotypes about nuclear-weapons scientists in his short paper, that nuclear-weapons scientists are political conservatives, are facing the moral dilemma during work, and are working barely for economic pursuit. Interviewees in the national laboratory all appear being liberal, feeling confidence about their contribution while remaining a little bit of helpless, and loving their “vocation”. The way Gusterson frames these scientists and contextualizes their behavior in a historically way, leads to a question that what makes these scientists unique because of their expertise when compared with President Reagan?

Coming back to the notion of “empirical science”, it goes in accord with Weber’s argument that “scientific work is chained to the course of progress” and “Scientific progress is the most important fraction of the process of intellectualization”. Weber asks and answers the question of the meaning of scientific and being a scientist, by tracing back the history of science or nature to enlightenment period. He accentuates the structural differences with science itself when comes the relationship between scientific work and presuppositions, which leads to the comparison between natural science and medicine, or even biology. When he mentions the relationship between science and religion, what sprung to my mind was when the Pope recognized the evolution theory. Science seems to become a more powerful religion itself.

Finally, we reach an agreement that science is politically, socially, and culturally constructed, the question is does such agreement might cost the cultural authority of science, when people like DJT claims the climate change is a hoax and drives scientists to march in Washington?                                                                                    

This week's texts engaged with the constitution of knowledge as 'science', and what that means for contemporary scientific fields. Generally, they emphasized the fallacy of a pure 'objective' knowledge. For the first piece, "How Medicine Constitutes its Objects", he follows the Foucaldian line of conceptualizing the field of medicine as not only 'materially individualist' but also how illness has been constructed as being separate from the person. That is to say, the social and political context of being a person on this world has been separated from the conception of illness. Illness becomes purely biological and 'objective', valorizing the notion of the discrete which sort of blurs the bigger picture. The "Growing up in a Weapons Lab" looked at the ways in which nuclear weapon scientists constructed morality as a defense mechanism to the work they do. And finally, the Traweek piece traced the way a performance of gender is taught through the process of an education in physics. 

Something I've learned from my academic trajectory at this school is the way I've grown to hate science more and more, maybe not in like a petty/ex-pre med kind of way, but more of a historical trauma kind of thing. I'm interested in seeing how discussion tomorrow might tackle the history of enlightenment though and tracing colonialist/liberal thought of rationality as a culture of its own. Or not, I'm still excited.

Two things relevant to this week's readings:

1. Scientists move the doomsday clock closer to midnight.

"Ms. Bronson, in a post-announcement interview, explained why the board had included the 30-second mark in the measurement. She said that it was an attention-catching signal that was meant to acknowledge “what a dangerous moment we’re in, and how important it is for people to take note.”

“We’re so concerned about the rhetoric, and the lack of respect for expertise, that we moved it 30 seconds,” she said. “Rather than create panic, we’re hoping that this drives action.”

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Dr. Titley and Dr. Krauss elaborated on their concerns, citing the increasing threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, as well as President Trump’s pledges to impede what they see as progress on both fronts, as reasons for moving the clock closer to midnight."

2. Dan Carlin just put out a 6 hour long episode of his Hardcore History podcast on the history of nuclear weapons, called The Destroyer of Worlds. Ignore the dramatic graphics. Or don't.

I'm only about 3 hours in but it's been striking and informative so far. He gets into the different philosophical orientations of politicians vs. scientists and overall provides a bit of larger lens to the piece we read this week. Just in case you've got 6 hours of free time.

--Jake

Reading reflections, Jan 26th

Among this week’s readings, I personally felt most enlightened by “Pilgrim’s Progress,” likely because I used to be quite passionate about becoming a physicist myself. A theme in this chapter is the heroism and romanticism with which stories about the advancement of physics are constructed, which I suspect was one of the reasons I dreamed of becoming a physicist. Traweek contrasted this innocent view about doing physics with the tasks, challenges and frustrations a particle physicist typically faces in different stages of his/her career, especially the subtleties in interpersonal interactions among members of a research group as well as the larger particle physicist community, about which physicists tend to appear not to care much because they regard social skills as opposite to science and rationality. But undergraduate students, inspired by the stories of legendary physicists from the margins of their textbooks, may not be well prepared for all of these. The author’s discussion about the relationship between physics and gender is also interesting, although I want to argue that, besides the characteristics of nature that are usually associated with the females, such as passivity, elusiveness and beauty (from a physicist’s point of view), nature with its physical laws can also be perceived as powerful and unrelenting, traits often associated conventionally with the males. In addition, I am curious if the same elements of romanticism and genderedness also exist in other academic communities besides the particle physicists.

Good studies on a different community – medical school students, and his focus is on the formation and construction of human and illness. He showed how the medical training provides the students a different view on the human body, and how the anatomy lab almost feels like entering a different world, based on which he argued “the person is a cultural construct.” Although the cultural construct of human and illness leads to “inattention to the lifeworld of the patient,” it is also inevitable given the goals of medical practice, as Good pointed out. Regarding the style of the writing, however, I want to say that although I appreciate the author’s philosophical knowledge, sometimes I don’t think it is really necessary for him to throw in a philosopher’s concept while making his arguments, such as Wittgenstein’s “language game” and Austin’s “speech act,” because I think both of these concepts were originally introduced for very different philosophical purposes.

Session 2 Reading Reflection

Two of this week’s readings discussed the different stages of learning that medical students and physics go through in their path to become experts. “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects” discussed medical school and how it reshapes not only medical student’s language and knowledge but also their method of seeing, understanding, and engagement with the world while “Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics” focused more on the hurdles that physics students have to overcome in their career path and what anxieties they might have at each hurdle. The third article, “Coming of Age In a Weapons Lab”, discussed how scientists who worked in a weapons lab were able to come to terms with their work and their personal views on the issue of nuclear weapon use.

I noticed that both the authors for “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab” and for “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects” used the word ritual to describe certain things that the scientists or students did. I found the use of the word very interesting because I typically associate the word with folk or religious ceremonies rather than scientific processes. As a science major and also coming from a family where everyone either works in the medical field or a science field, I have always viewed science solely as a fact. Reading these articles made me more aware of the ways in which science is also a culture of its own. I found it especially interesting how the medical student described a visiting applicant during an anatomy as a violation in a funny way. It was as if medical school had created a secret community that outsiders should not intrude on.

Realizations

The readings for this week were interesting for me in a multitude of ways--they were enlightening as well as challenging. The two I engaged with the most were Good's "How Medicine Constructs its Objects," and Traweek's "Pilgrim's Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics." The articles both addressed professions that I have somewhat of an attachment to, which made each experience reading them a more personal and connected one than otherwise. With my older sister pursuing her PhD in physics and quite a few of my friends aspiring doctors, it was hard for me not to imagine them as the nameless people I read about in the articles.This personal attachment forced me to read the articles and the situations with somewhat of a guard, as the descriptions the articles detailed often didn't align with the characteristics of my friends or my sister.

I will begin with Traweek's article, "Pilgrim's Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics." Immediately, I was taken aback by the forceful and enclosing use of the description "male" in the title and the introduction, being used as somewhat of a first step to becoming a physicist. I continued reading, and was taken aback by the "tales" of becoming a physicist, as what I learned about in the article does not align with a lot of my sister's experiences as a physics major and now PhD student. Traweek emphasizes the studious aspect of a physics student, "...students learn from textbooks whose interpretation of physics is not to be challenged; in fact, it is not to be seen as interpretation" (75). Later, Traweek details the kind of characteristics expected from a physicist, "'hard and willing worker'" and so on, and most importantly, unemotional or unconfident (83). Virtually all of Traweek's descriptions of physicists were different than how I characterize my sister.

A similar thing happened when I read "How Medicine Constructs its Objects" by Good. I cannot imagine the intensity that my friends will have to endure going to medical school after reading this article. From the way Good describes how students are required to look at human bodies anatomically--how students are supposed to forget about the social and emotional "human" aspects at times when expected to understand the body. My relationship with my friends is especially contrasting because of how much of a social basis the relationship is set on. It is difficult to imagine my friends severing their relationship with social and emotional responses for certain time periods because that is the only responses I have ever received from them.

My thoughts, however, are probably not unrequited. This brings me to understand, however, a fault in my own thinking and understanding of the concepts. My sister is only one semester along on her PhD, and the majority of my friends have only taken half of the pre-medical school requirements and expectations. I'm sure there is variance between those in the paper and my friends and sister--I am not doubting that there is some truth to the differences I notice. It does make me realize, however, that students are mostly unaware of the culture or "pilgrimage" associated with an aspiring career field. My sister may have a love for physics, but she may not be able to hold her own becoming an serious researcher in physics because that is not something you learn about until you are thrown into it. And my friends may see themselves as doctors, but it is no doubt that they will have emotional and academic struggles in medical school. The reading for this week made me think about how, oftentimes, you don't know what to expect when going into a field of study, which makes it all the more taunting to commit to one (in my opinion). These articles illustrate strong evidence for cultures within science and academics, but also how it is a culture many people don't classically think to associate with pilgrimage. I'm interested to see how I view academic fields now, and if I will try to find patterns and aspects of culture in sections of science and academics that I didn't used to before.  

Reading Reflection: Becoming a Scientist

The three readings for this week’s class focused on science and the culture that surrounds the scientific field, workplace, and the workers that employ this field. More specifically, it focused on what it means to become a scientist in different areas of the modern world and how the culture of science and its active participants (the scientists) shape each other.

Out of the three readings, however, I, as an aspiring pre-med student, found Byron Good’s “How Medicine Constructs Its Objects” the most interesting. In this article, Good observes the way in which new American medical school students are inducted into the medical field. Once medical school begins, the students are taught to think, see, and speak in a completely different way from what they knew before. The bodies they deal with and the patients they see are now regarded in a highly mechanical and biological way. The article also goes on to talk about some of the other aspects of the medical field that students must learn to navigate correctly in order to become a successful and respected member of the field, such as how to conduct medical interviews with their patients and the correct way of giving case presentations. The indoctrination of these medical students are very specific to the medical community and fits well into the needs and demands of the occupation. 

I thought this reading as a whole was interesting because many times, people view biomedicine, or Western medicine, as “hard science” based on empirical data in which culture seems to have no place in. I have had conversations with peers who view science and culture as two different spheres with no overlap between them. But this ethnographic account, along with the two others on the physics community and the nuclear workplace, shows that science, and specifically biomedicine in this case, is a rich culture hub itself.

I think it is important to remember that science is subject to social and cultural construction, and the scientists who make up the field are humans themselves—cultural beings who together have, and are still continuing to, form communities of their own with its unique rules and norms. 

While reading the assigned papers for this week, one major theme that I deduced was that the fields of medicine and science have a culture of compartmentalization in response to a need to prioritize their work. This is in part due to this overarching idea that the advance of science is always ultimately “for the greater good”, and in part due to the sterile way in which the scientific method is carried out in these fields.

In Hugh Gusterson’s “Coming of Age in a Weapons Lab”, he investigates the culture in a nuclear weapons development lab. He expects that he will see that the scientists are guilty or ashamed of their work, but instead he observes that they believe in the morality of it. They rationalize what they do into something that is necessary for the defense of their country, and that nuclear weapons are intended to prevent killing. My reaction mirrors that of the evangelical physicist’s statement “What scares me more than the weapons themselves is that my colleagues think they’ll never be used. That’s a form of denial. That’s worshiping the human race.” While I don’t know these scientists and I do not presume to know their thoughts, from the readings, it seemed like they were justifying their actions to themselves on the (shaky) basis of trust in those who would use their products. I thought it was interesting that Gusterson asserted that they also used weapons testing as a ritual to simulate human control over the weapon. It seems to me that this serves as an analogy for their justification of their work. It is an illusion.

In Byron Good’s “How Medicine Constructs its Objects”, he illuminates how illness has been separated from the person who carries that illness in a way that ignores the person behind the body. Doctors focus on the physiological problems of the body, and, while not completely dehumanizing, a medical gaze identifies the body as a reconstruction of biological and anatomical parts. I thought that this paper on how biomedicine is taught shows that when we are taught science from a young age, we don’t feel that we need to learn anything else in order to treat patients. I see this especially as a pre-med student, in that med schools look especially at our GPA and our MCAT scores in order to determine our placement. We also see this in situations where doctors are baffled by issues such as phantom limbs and disorders where there are no clear physiological issues. We hunt down clues with MRI scans, looking at differences in brain activity and hormone levels, desperately trying to find a clean cut cause and effect. I think, in terms of this class Culture of Science and Technology, it’s most interesting to see that this culture is expounded by technological advances. As we become able to quantify and graph our bodies, through measurements of devices and machines, it has become our obsession.

A Delicate Dance, or Musings about Challenging the Moral Superiority of Normal Science contra Making Space for Alt-Facts

Stories we tell ourselves as "novices,"
with help from highly mobile web comics.

Traweek’s chapter, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” is amusing, though perhaps not on purpose, because it is overly-descriptive. I really enjoy reading descriptive ethnography written up through the 70s, but this reads strikingly similar to the classic works on rites of manhood by old tuskers like Gilbert Herdt, Barry S. Hewlett, and Napoleon Chagnon. On the other hand, Traweek’s book was published in 1988, well after this kind of writing fell out of favor in anthropology, which tells me that she’s writing descriptively as a way of making the familiar strange. She does this by using the same voice that anthropologists have historically used in their exoticization of non-White, non-Euro Others, but with middle-class, male physicists. It is a political act, in a Horace Miner kind of way, which challenges what Bourdieu called the misrecognition – or taken-for-grantedness – of science as supracultural or men as scientists (and, by extension, rational-thinking penis-havers as independent from history and culture).

In his chapter, Gusterson focuses on another kind of physicist from Traweek: nuclear (not particle), female (not male). Rather than write of her (and other “weapon scientists”) descriptively, Gusterson leads with Haraway’s theorization of situated knowledges, a concept that emphasizes the personal histories, influenced by social, political, and economic histories, from which one cannot divorce themselves. In other words, as Traweek pointed out, science and scientists are not supracultural.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: The hero of the masses.

These readings have (at least) two things in common. First, they are all about occupational training, which draws our attention to the ways in which individuals learn and how they are taught. In other words, they are enculturated or socialized with particular practices and expectations. Focusing on training means focusing on a sort of transitional phase from “novice” to “specialist” (as Traweek and pre-Writing Culture ethnographers would have put it), and taking transition as a unit of analysis allows us to pay special attention to how practices and expectations become embedded. This is the second thing they all have in common: Whether physics or medicine (i.e. Good’s chapter), both practitioners and participants of both fields consider their corpora of knowledge to be – not just supracultural (I don’t think that goes far enough) – naturalized, misrecognized, taken-for-granted, a process that is institutionalized by the state, family, school, church and so forth. This ahistorical status allows those institutions and the practitioners of those sciences to – so long as it regards the practice of those sciences – elevate themselves above the same kind of political, moral, and ethical entanglements in which “softer” individuals might find themselves. We see this kind of self-aggrandizing from the scientific wing of the so-called "Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse" - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And as scientists argue for the moral superiority of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, it can even become violent and potentially genocidal. Here, I think of the case of the astronomers (yet another kind of physicist) who fought tooth and nail to put their thirty meter telescope on a sacred mountain in Mauna Kea, Hawaii against the wishes of Native Hawaiians.

Of course, the problem with challenging the unquestionable, ahistorical, supracultural formulation of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology is that we must then question the knowledge they produce, which then translates to (inadvertently) making space for...#altfacts.