Due to STS’ commitment to the co-constructed social action and organization behind science, a lifting of the curtain, most STS scholars come from traditions of anthropology, sociology, or history. Most STS studies, therefore, combine ethnographic, archival, or bibliometric methods of analysis (Davies, 2022). Millerand et al. (2012), for instance, analyzes ethnographic data (e.g. observations, interviews, analysis of documents), to argue that storytelling and sensemaking come to shape the creation and adoption of a metadata standard among ecology researchers. The authors argue (1) that the scientific standards are not guided by a top-down process of systematization, but rather through asymmetrical adoption through storytelling. In other words, “a new story of the standard and the standardization process has begun to emerge within the Network. In this story, the standard is not yet a success, substantial work in implementation remains, and doing this work requires changes to the standard itself” (p. 8). (2) Ethnographers themselves participate in these organizational changes as intervening participants. The authors therefore “were not privileged actors ‘unveiling’ the truth of an issue to those mired in a situated view of their troubles; rather, we were one kind of participant in a highly diverse, largely expert mix of participants seeking to enact a standard” (p. 17).
While many STS studies employ qualitative methods to illuminate the social practice of science, Law (2009) also calls into question the performativity of methods. Put differently, methods practices “help to enact the world that they describe.” He argues so through a Foucauldian archaeological analysis of a Eurobarometer survey assessing citizens’ attitudes toward farm animal welfare. His findings argue for more critical scrutiny of the onto-epistemological assumptions that underlie the empiricism of survey data.
“Do consumers’ attitudes reflect consumers’ actions? Not necessarily. Are citizens the same as consumers? Again, not necessarily. Is rational consumption consistent with ethical consumption? Well, surely it depends. Do people at the point of purchase necessarily want to be the site at which ethics and politics are done? Often not. Does survey research catch what is important about consumption? Arguably not, at least a lot of the time (Law, 2009, p. 250).”
In a radical stance that mirrors the methodological pluralism (and at times anarchism) of Feyerabend (1974), Law argues for the need to come to terms with the death of universalism. This entails a call for researchers to step into the particular – a particular that leads not into a linear fragmentation of knowledge, but rather a “promise of distributed
and heterogeneous politics of reals” (Law, 2009, p. 251).
As we transition into the third and final part of this abridged journey through storytelling in STEM, namely science communication, Phipps and Rowe (2010) inscribe the contours of the boundary between STS and science communication. Drawing from mixed methods analysis through a lens of sociocultural theory, they investigate how variation in color-coding schemes of temperature in oceanic satellite imagery reveals variation in science literacy and its development among museumgoers. I position this study as a border study for two reasons: (1) Phipps and Rowe’s aesthetic arguments posit how color schemes come to inscribe science (Ma et al., 2012) (such as when rainbow color schemes with yellow as its midpoint create a false sense of intensity among interpreters of scientific maps [Light & Bartlein, 2004]). (2) Phipps and Rowe’s quantitative analysis of testing museumgoers’ understanding of maps and qualitative analysis of non-scientist museumgoers’ reported experience of map sensemaking outlines the primary goal of both research and practice in scientific communication – analyzing how make science legible and digestible for non-academic, non-scientific audiences.
Ontogenetic Reflection
Listening to this section six months later definitely puts into sharp relief the struggle of the comprehensive exam. I realize I definitely bit off more than I could chew when trying to weave applied linguistics, STEM, science and technology studies, and organization studies into one paper. Honestly, the more that I repeat this to myself, the more it sounds like insanity.
Clearly, I have a lot more that I would like to read. One of those books is another work by John Law called After Method. I really wanted to focus on what Law has to say about how method practices help enact the world that they describe. While he does this from a Foucauldian lens to examine surveys, it also reminded me of a very affecting event that happened when I was attending the Global Virtual Forum .
Within the Q&A session of this proposal, one professor provided a very critical view of the ways that the presenter talked about his methodological practices as “gathering data.” He critically reflected on how describing his research as a data-gathering process also inevitably reduces his participants to data. As a scholar who is also taking a critical stance toward applied linguistics methods and their unyielding rigidity, I definitely had to agree with this professor’s take.
When we talk about things as data — particularly when it comes to interviews — we are inevitably reducing, and potentially even demeaning, our participants’ stories. This is why storytelling has become so impactful for me. When I think about what I do in interviews as a storytelling process, it takes me away from the ideology of interviews as data. Thinking about interviews as storytelling also fills me with a deeper sense of responsibility to my interview participants as others. What I mean by that is: my exposure to participants and their stories fills me with a sense of responsibility to treat those stories with care and sensitivity — but, on the other hand, not to background myself as also a storyteller.
My living story is always in contact with participants’ living stories, and that contact is not experienced through a linear sense of time. Every time I go back and listen to an interview, I am reliving the nonlinear time of conducting the interview in the first place. There is something almost chronotopic about thinking about interviews in this way.
This does not mean that I want to adopt a fully post-qualitative inquiry approach. I think that Elizabeth St. Pierre, in particular, comes across as quite dogmatic in her proselytizing of post-qualitative inquiry, and that it often over-centers Western continental philosophy and North American indigenous traditions. But one thing I am very much on board with is decoupling my vocabulary from “data” — not thinking about the qualitative practices I enact as data collection, but rather as mutual storytelling.
Here’s the Global Virtual Forum talk I mention.
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