Sormani2024
| Sormani2024 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Sormani2024 |
| Author(s) | Philippe Sormani |
| Title | Renormalizing science? Postanalytic inquiry for post-normal times* |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Michael Lynch |
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| Year | 2024 |
| Language | English |
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| Journal | Ethnographic Studies |
| Volume | 20 |
| Number | |
| Pages | 268-295 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.26034/lu.ethns.2024.6922 |
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Abstract
In 1993, Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action, Michael Lynch’s landmark volume on ethnomethodology and social studies of science, was published at Cambridge University Press (Lynch 1993). In the same year, a journal named Futures published ‘Science for the Post-Normal Age’ (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), a seminal essay in the field of science policy expertise by now. Thirty years on, Lynch has masterfully edited Garfinkel’s Studies of Work in the Sciences (Garfinkel 2022), while the qualifier ‘post-normal’ has become a recurring trope for tension-riddled societies, if not sociology as a tricky project itself (e.g., Thorpe 2022). Taking its cue from these publications, genealogies, and coincidences, this paper pauses on Lynch’s legacy in ethnomethodological studies of scientific work, while reflexively explicating its distinctive contribution to science and technology studies (STS). As a reflexive explication, the paper engages with ‘Lynch on science’ in the light of prior readings and reviews, as well as in view of new articulations of ethnomethodology, STS, and sociology (e.g., Marres 2023). In 1993, Lynch introduced ‘postanalytic inquiry’ as scholarly inspired praxeology, while offering a subtly deflationist critique of ‘normalizing science’ (i.e., scientism at large). So what now? Instead of indulging in renormalizing science and social science, this paper articulates three readings of postanalytic inquiry in ethnomethodology — against, with, and beyond — that is, perhaps, Lynch’s ‘radical ethnomethodology’ (2016), if not anyone’s, for post-normal times.
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