Vertesi2025
| Vertesi2025 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Vertesi2025 |
| Author(s) | Janet Vertesi |
| Title | Science |
| Editor(s) | Andrew P. Carlin, Alex Dennis, K. Neil Jenkings, Oskar Lindwall, Michael Mair |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Science |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2025 |
| Language | English |
| City | Abingdon, UK |
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| Pages | 372–380 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.4324/9780429323904-37 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnomethodology |
| Chapter | 32 |
Abstract
Scientific work is members’ work. It takes place on a “shop floor” of a laboratory, with specialist tools and talk. Even scientific truths are situated accomplishments: enrolling artful practices which are highly local, contingent, and accomplished despite their lofty goal. As scientists establish community truths and objects for circulation, we observe the detailed construction of facticity and haecceity, and agreed-upon particulars. Ultimately, however, science is a source of fascination for ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts because doing science requires producing not only social order, but natural orders as well. This chapter begins with a tour of some of the early work in the field in the 1970s and 1980s that first casts knowledge work as work, including handling samples, interpreting results, and even accomplishing a “discovery”. We then turn to epistopics in the ethnomethodological and conversational study of contemporary science, with especial focus on those contextures of laboratory life today: screen work, teleconference calls, pixels, scripts and data sets. We will pay attention to enduring questions of representation, embodiment, and digitality, asking how they extend and challenge our existing tools, and what an approach grounded in the ethnomethodological and CA tradition can reveal. Fortunately, as we will see, ethnomethodology and CA can readily make large topics like “observation”, “big data”, and even “knowledge” in the sciences into something tractable, observable and reportable – and therefore ideal topics for our analysis.
Notes
