RESEARCH METHODS IN STS - 76358 - STSS 6110 - 01
10:00 am - 12:50 pm
Notes towards methods spring 2010
1. First day
a. Why do research (progressivism and critique of progressivism)
b. STS philosophy of research? Popper? Marx? Weber? Structualism, functionalism?
c.
Quantitative evaluation?
d. How to read (Dumit?)
e. Virtual genealogies (Hess)?
2. Becker, Tricks of the Trade. Guest lectures from Abby and Jess.
3. From symbolic interactionism to symbolic repertoires; working with documents and media. Clarke
chapter 5 (RU486 example). Critique of grounded theory:
http://www.tim.ethz.ch/education/courses/courses_fs_2007/course_docsem_fs_2007/literature/15_Th
omas_James_Reinventing_grounded_theory.pdf Symbolic repertoires: Hess:
http://www.davidjhess.org/SMsAnthroSci.html Eglash, master-slave article. Eglash, “Race, Sex and
Nerds.” (the distinction between figures, tropes, and interpretive repertoires).
4. Interpretative Ethnography. Geertz, intro on thick description and cockfight. Emerson et al, writing
ethnographic fieldnotes. Bourgois, Philippe. “Violating Apartheid in the United States,” pp. 19-47 in
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Bourgois excerpt form Twine and Warren (eds.) Racing Research, Researching Race. Zavella,
5. Authority and Power. Clifford, On Ethnographic Authority. Nadar, Laura. “Up the Anthropologist—
Perspectives Gained From Studying Up,” pp. 456-470 in Johnetta Cole (ed.). Anthropology from the
Eighties. New York: The Free Press, 1982. Gusterson, Hugh. “Studying Up Revisited.” Political and
Legal Anthropology Review. Vol. 20, No.1 (May 1997): 114-119. Patricia. “Feminist Insider
Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with Chicana Informants,’ pp. 138-159 in Diane Wolf (ed)
Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996.
6. Extended case, multi-sited, and World Systems approaches: Burawoy. Fischer. Glaeser, Andreas “An
Ontology for the Ethnographic Analysis of Social Processes: Extending the Extended-Case Method.”
Social Analysis, Volume 49, Number 3, Winter 2005 , pp. 16-45(30). Eglash, “An ethnomathematics
comparision of African and Native American divination systems.”
7. Research and online/offline relations: Kelty.
8. Interacting with indigenous communities. Eglash, Bamana Sand Divination. Carolyn Martin Shaw on
Ngweko (check her book)? Hermes, Mary. 1998. "Research Methods as a Situated Response:
Towards a First Nations' Methodology." Qualitative Studies in Education 11:155-168. Ginsburg, Faye
and Myers, Fred. “A History of Aboriginal Futures,” (with Fred Myers). Critique of Anthropology Vol.
26, No. 1:27–45, 2006. “Using Ethnographic Methods to Articulate Community-Based Conceptions of
Cultural Heritage Management” Public archaeology: archaeological ethnographies, Vol. 8 No. 2–3,
2009, 141–160.
9. Ethics. Jackson, Bruce. “Being Fair,” in Fieldwork. Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Thompson “ethics in agricultural research”? Haraway, Donna. Excerpts from “Modest Witness” and
“Companion Species.” Horowitz, Richard. “Just Stories of Ethnographic Authority,” in Carolyn Bretell
(ed.) When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey,
1993. Thorne, Barrie. “‘You Still Takin’ Notes?’ Fieldwork and the Problems of Informed Consent,”
Social Problems 27(3), Feb. 1980: 284-297.
10. Designing research experiments. Haraway, D. “Fetus.” pp. 173-212 in Modest_Witness@Second
Millennium. Routledge 1997. Martin, Brian. “Sticking a needle into science.” Agre, Phil. “Critical
Technical Practice.” Eglash et al, “Ethnocomputing.” Disalvo et al. “Local Issues , Local Uses: Tools
for Robotics and Sensing in Community Contexts School of Design.”
11. Non-human agency – Pickering (chapters from Mangle and “Technoscience”). Eglash: “Indigenous
nanoscience. Danny Miller, “Material Culture.” Suchman http://bscw.wineme.fb5.unisiegen.de/pub/bscw.cgi/d159059/Suchman0000_HumanMachineReconsidered_Online.pdf
12. Collaborationist Stance: McCarthy, Elise and Kelty, Chris. “Responsibility and Nanotechnology.”
Hess et al on community collaborations. Kemmis, Stephen and Robin McTaggart. 2000. "Participatory
Action Research." Pp. 567-606 in Handbook of Qualitative Research, Second Edition, edited by N.
Denzin and Y. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 2010. Scott Frickel, Sahra Gibbon, Jeff Howard,
Joana Kempner, Gwen Ottinger, and David Hess. "Undone Science: Social Movement Challenges to
Dominant Scientific Practice." Science, Technology, and Human Values 35(4): 444-473.
13. Class presentations
------------------------------------------------Discourse analysis? See http://cardiff.ac.uk/encap/contactsandpeople/profiles/jaworski-adam.html
Visualization? Software (Atlas Ti)? Scientific Imaginary? Visual analysis?
Exercise: provide a short description of the 5 “scapes” or dimensions in a study you propose or imagine
proposing. (Clarke pg 165). This could go under either discourse analysis or multi-sited (global)
ethnography.
Exercise: describe tropes, figures, or cultural repertoires in some area of study. Interpellation (read
althusair?).
http://figuringoutmethods.wikispaces.com/
Studying actions in context: a qualitative shadowing method for organizational research
http://qrj.sagepub.com/content/5/4/455.short
Critique of grounded theory:
http://www.tim.ethz.ch/education/courses/courses_fs_2007/course_docsem_fs_2007/literature/15_Thoma
s_James_Reinventing_grounded_theory.pdf They phrase it as contrast between empirico-inductive
inquiry (as distinct from the traditional hypothetico-deductive inquiry of natural scientists).
Symbolic interactionism: Goffman. http://www.bola.biz/communications/goffman.html (see also
http://www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/classes/soc782/moody/class_9.htm and
http://ssr1.uchicago.edu/NEWPRE/CULT98/Goffman1.html ). See Alasuutari ch 9 “structures of
interaction.” Use Tolu’s essay on Goffman’s face here? symbolic interaction as dramaturgical
perspective in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. “Dramaturgy and Social
Movements: The Social Construction and Communication of Power†” Goffman influenced by Mead—
studied at university of chicago.
George H. Mead – see http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Mead/pubs/Mead_1913.html for nice example
of how Mead thought of generation of social self as similar to scientist generating new paradigm—it is
evolutionary in nature. Started with Hegelian dialectics but dropped idealism; inspired by William James
and John Dewey; pragmatism.
Robert Park – student of Dewey, Group solidarity correlates to a great extent with animosity toward an
out-group. Exposed King Leopold in Belgium; worked with Tuskegee institute, but also encouraged less
judgemental approach: "the conception of the relativity of the moral order."
Herbert Blumer (7 March 1900 – 13 April 1987) – student of Mead, invented term “symbolic
interactionism.” Failed to include social structure such as class.
Harold Garfinkle – accepted Schütz’ critique of Parsons: actors do not make decisions based on external
rationality; rather rationality is a product of their interactions; what we would now call a social
construction. “any social setting [can] be viewed as self-organizing with respect to the intelligible
character of its own appearances.” Meaning is recursively constructed – observations become the
grounds for the evaluations that produce the observations. Coffee example:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/c65025605qph38r2/
Suchman on Garfinkle, as well as the whole spectrum of work at Xerox Parc:
http://www.workpractice.com/wpt-fest/introduction.html -- see also her chapter in Cognition, computing,
and cooperation (but that’s rather dense and detailed).
Get this if you can, shows why networks replaced struct-funct: Mitchell, J. Clyde.
1973. “Networks, Norms and Institutions.” Pp. 15–35 in Network Analysis Studies
in Human Interaction, ed. Jeremy Boissevain and J. Clyde Mitchell. The Hague: Mouton.
Michael Lynch—ethnomethodology on Iran-Contra:
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/sociology/about/events/ethnography/journal/issue11/documents/lynch05100
9.pdf
Malinowski, Levi-strauss, Radcliff-Brown.
Gluckman.
Durkheim influenced Goffman (says Randy Collins). (Mention Durkheim’s study of suicide?) Durkheim:
social bonds estabilished via shared ritual and interaction.
ethnomethodology, and grounded theory?
Social contract theorists -- Hobbes: relations between individuals competative except for threats from
Levithan. Smith: division of labor creates cooperation. Enlightenment theorists (Rousseau, Locke,
Hume?)—recursion of self-governance. Foucault: self-governance itself can be a means of subjugation.
Structuralism, functionalism, strux-func. Granovetter: weak ties, network theory.
Network analysis of informal housing in Narobi: http://www.holcimfoundation.org/Portals/1/docs/F07/WKInf/F07-WK-Inf-omenya02.pdf
Network analysis of fertility: http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2009-006.pdf
Induction, deduction, abduction (Dewey?). Wittgenstein: human rule-following is contextual, dependent on
larger interpretive community. John Austin, Ordinary Language Philosophy -> performative speech acts.
Marxist concept of objectification and commodity fetishism.
Ideographic vs nomothetic
inductive analysis? Patton
Jameson’s “cognitive praxis”
http://www.atlasti.com/demo.html
Ferguson multi-sited ethnography
Notes on Becker, “Tricks of the Trade”
Pg 96—Studying Nothing – Traweek etc.
Pg 97 – conversation analysis. Discourse analysis—I need to include something about that and other
specific methods. Visualization techniques, etc.
Pg 100 – he makes it sound like Secrecy is something Simmel defined. But Simmel defined it for
whatever culture he studies. In Africa, for example, secrecy is completely different. Similar Otaku
knowledge sharing and Scientific knowledge sharing are very different. Jasanoff on transparency.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------My own tips:
Don’t study in your own back yard
Don’t ask your informants to do your work for you.
Ask sufficiently open questions, rather than binary yes/no questions.
Write down everything! Don’t stop your informants from going off on tangents (great example in Kelty’s
book with music), let them talk.
Do enough preliminary research so that you won’t be insulting them by asking naïve questions.
The hardest part (for me at least) is how to take something everyone “knows” and turn it into an object of
study. So everyone knows OSS and agrees its super-cool. But that isn’t a social science analysis. Not
until you turn it into a recursive public, and then suddenly it’s a brilliant theoretical exegesis. Same for
David Hess and garage sales, organic food stores etc.—suddenly it’s an alternative paths social
movement. Or Jess Lyons: went from an interesting feeling of contradiction to a new paradigm of
enviroculturalism.
The anti-quantitative bias in STS: need to find that paper from Irvine.
Experiments: sticking a needle into science. Phil Agre. Kelty’s participation in creative commons license.
My work in education. Phoebe Senger.
http://qualitativeresearch.ratcliffs.net/15methods.pdf (15 Methods of Data Analysis in Qualitative
Research)
-----------------------In 1975, Rodney Needham suggested that some phenomena encountered by anthropologists, like certain
kinds of descent systems, might be best understood as polythetic classes—categories whose members
bear overlapping family resemblances to each other, as well as to members of other classes, but don't
exhibit the sort of single and exclusive defining feature which conventional monothetic definitions
assumed.