This debate is homologous to debates on the role of narrative among historians. Norman (1991), a philosopher of history, dichotomizes these two sides as impositionalism and anti-referentialism. Impositionalism posits that “telling a story about the past necessarily involves a certain kind of interpretative violence…[They] believe that telling a story inevitably imposes a falsifying narrative structure on the past and come to the unhappy (and contrary to experience) skeptical conclusion that narratives cannot be true.” (Norman, 1991, p. 120). Anti-referentialists, on the other hand, “opt out of the problem by denying that narrative histories even claim truth…motivated largely by the desire to foreground the other, non-referential functions of narrative discourse” (Norman, 1991, p. 133) Within this frame, many STEM scholars come across as impositionalists when it comes to narrativizing or storying science.
Katz (2013, p. 1045) ironically stakes an impositionalist position through a story: “In break rooms of biology research labs, one often hears: “It’d be a great story if X regulated Y by novel mechanism Z.” Experiments might be prioritized by asking, “Is it important for your story?…Storytelling therefore impedes communication of critical information by restricting the scope of the data to that agreeable with the story.” Yet Olson (2015) notes that while scientists often bemoan the fabulist connotations of storytelling, storytelling also plays a powerful role in the economy of publishing and citation. Some prominent scientists, in fact, exercise frustration with this economy through quasi-political stances toward the situated role of storytelling in the publishing practices of high impact STEM journals.
Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, in his acceptance speech for his 2013 Nobel Prize, even went so far as to announce his own personal boycott of the top journals, saying that he and members of his laboratory would no longer submit their papers to the three most important scientific journals, Science, Nature and Cell. He did this because he feels the criteria for acceptance has been based on “significance” (how big is the story the paper tells?) rather than “soundness” (how well done is the research?) (Olson, 2015, p. 10).
Put differently, Olson argues that the weight journals put on the significance of the study aligns with the concept of newsworthiness, which is ultimately a storytelling endeavor – an endeavor some scientists spurn when it comes to the most widely cited yet most generalist journals. Schimel (2012), however, illuminates scientists’ storytelling approaches to specialized technical journals as well. He reproduces introductory paragraphs of published articles to show how scientists-as-writers consider the needs of readers and audiences for any publishing or grant-awarding institution. Even technical research seeks to tell the story of its own necessity.
2.1.3. STEM scholarship as story
Yet it is also important to note that in some STEM disciplines, storytelling is central to disciplinary debates – debates not about the presentation of science, but the process (e.g. Conroy’s [1991] review of Landau’s [1991] Narratives of Human Evolution). I draw from evolutionary biology as an illustrative example. Coen (2019) theorizes storytelling as a biological arms race—an arms race between (proto)stories as pragmatic problem-solving communicational strategies and (proto)stories as a tool for lying in the name of self-interest. Such an arms race parallels Katz’ concerns over the latent potential for deception within narrative-driven presentations of science. Coen (2019, p. 67) even posits that “science arose when skills in detecting lies through empirical contradictions were applied to stories about how the world operates, whereas mathematics arose when skills in discerning lies through self-contradiction were applied to abstract reasoning.”
While this represents a more biopsychosocial use of storytelling in STEM research, Jenner’s (2022) approach to narrative works in contrast to traditional modes of phylogeny within evolutionary biology. In other words, Jenner argues that storytelling is important to establish the genealogy of species, particularly when scientists must infer causal evolutionary links from fragmented, discontinuous information – a practice Jenner deems essential to the discipline. “If you want to know what happened in evolution, and you are incorporating into this endeavor aspects of what you think you already know, your approach is narrative and you are engaged in evolutionary storytelling. This is the epistemic core that connects the first generations of evolutionary biologists to comparative biologists today” (Jenner, 2022, p. 335). In sum, STEM disciplines who depend on speculation to connect incomplete fragments of empirical data (not to be confused with speculation on unobservable phenomena through mathematical proofs[1]) also harbor scholars who advocate for storytelling as essential to their research practices.
Through this abridged analysis of the literature, I argue that STEM researchers often hold conflicted views toward narrative and storytelling in STEM research. (1) Some scholars endorse storytelling in science writing and presentation – particularly within the aesthetics of data visualization (Krzywinski & Cairo, 2013a; Wong 2011a, 2011b) (2) Others are skeptical of storytelling, adopting an impositionalist lens to question the potential for storytelling to oversimplify complex scientific data and debates (Katz, 2013). (3) Some embrace storytelling not only in the (re)presentation of research, but also in the production of research (Jenner, 2022; Medawar, 1982; Olson, 2015). Finally, while this analysis of STEM scholars’ discussions of storytelling within science predictably lacks studies of co-constructed or co-narrated storytelling in its canonical oral medium, co-narration also appears through (1) the accretive inter-lab dialogue in the form of sedimented discourse through publications (the next section explores this further) and (2) evidence of intra-lab co-construction in the form of higher co-corresponding authorship in STEM fields relative to humanities and social sciences (Tian et al., 2023).
[1] Coen (2019) makes this distinction regarding mathematics and theory-heavy STEM fields like physics.
Ontogenetic Reflection
You know, I really feel like I opened a can of worms for myself by introducing Norman. The paper where he’s discussing the debate between impositionalism and non-referentialism really broke my brain about how I try to approach qualitative research — particularly through the phrase of interpretive violence. I’ve often heard decolonial scholars reference notions of epistemic violence, which I suppose you can see as a form of impositionalism — bringing an interpretive violence to (and entailing violent erasure of) the knowledges of colonized peoples and colonized land. However, it is also hard to read Norman’s argument and not consider whether any form of qualitative research that aims to present semi-generalizable conclusions through grounded theory, thematic coding, or other empirical methods also constitutes interpretive violence.
After all, when I read most studies conducted through thematic analysis or grounded theory, it’s very common that this comes from interview data. And that interview data, very often, is not treated as a co-constructed interaction, as we see from scholars like Anna DeFina, Sabine Perrino, or Matthew Prior. Rather, we can see interview data being treated akin to survey data when it is chopped up and put into a blender, rendered decontextualized. The researcher then impresses an interpretive order (or an order that “emerges”) upon this interview soup — a soup that is often full of lived tensions, contradictions, and messiness that will not suit the demand for a clean narrative and an 8,000 word limit.
And while such researchers may bring their analysis to participants in the form of member checking, I often question how often such checks produce participant pushback. Rarely, if ever, have I read an article where a researcher discusses a member checking procedure that resulted in participant pushback. Or, at least, not where such pushback gets reported. Is it that participant pushback simply smoothed over in a revision of the paper’s narrative? Or is it that participants take the path of least resistance and adopt the preferred response of “yes, it’s fine with me,” or “yes, it sounds good,” or “yes, I learned something about myself”? After all, to present an interpretation can by itself disrupt and prime a participant’s reconstructive memory (i.e. the work of Elizabeth Loftus). Yet the third sample response two sentences ago also suggests that such impositions need not be harmful. They can, in fact, be revelatory and beneficial to participants. But as researchers intra-act, the typical standards of truth, accuracy, or saturation also call for a re-examination.
That was a bit of a tangent. But I must say that I thought the Randy Schekman example is very interesting. I didn’t know that among a lot of STEM scholars, some avoided the top journals because such journals care too much about telling stories. I’m really curious to see where this rabbit hole goes — and I do know that in a later section I discuss the rise of the PlosONE journals as a counter-discourse against what many STEM scholars see as the storytelling bias of Science, Nature, or Cell. But that’s a much later story to tell.
In the meantime, I appreciate anybody who took the time to read — and I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Until next time,
Cheers!
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