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.”