Philippe Sormani

Culture in Interaction: Academic Identities in Laboratory Work

The present contribution is based on an ongoing ethnography of laboratory work in a physics and a genetics laboratory, respectively. The proposed ethnographic account addresses “academic identities” as a sociological issue by turning it into the following empirical question: how, if at all, are academic identities relevant issues for laboratory work? The curious neglect of that question in both higher education and ethnographic studies provides the reason for doing so. The contribution, then, provides the building blocks of an appropriate answer to the raised question. Firstly, it discusses, from the ethnographic perspective of laboratory studies, the recent literature in higher education studies on the topic of academic identities. The reliance of that literature on interview accounts will be of particular interest. Secondly, the detailed analysis of differently situated activities will allow us to examine how laboratory members themselves achieve and exhibit the social organization of their laboratory, their working activities and respective identities. For instance, laboratory members’ use of membership categorizations and their formulation of ordinary rules of conduct will be examined as two related ways of exhibiting the social organization of scientific practice. In conclusion, we will discuss the analysis with respect to the methodological issues it solves and the empirical results it provides. A preliminary remark as to our methodology may be nevertheless suitable. Certainly, it will prove to be difficult to describe scientific practice from within its disciplinary relevancies via participant observation (especially if one lacks adequate training, as we do). That difficulty as such, however, does not challenge participant observation as a working solution to figure out what an appropriate answer to the stated question may look like: an answer that is detailed so as to recover laboratory work in its practitioners’ relevancies, among which, perhaps, their respective identities of academic membership.

Practice-based video analysis: a position statement

Practice-based video analysis stands for an ethnomethodological approach that makes explicit the analyst’s practical experience in the technical practice that his or her video analysis bears upon. This paper offers a position statement advocating such a “bastard” approach (cf. Lynch 2015). First, the paper outlines the programmatic interest of the approach in the field of ethnography, ethnomethodology, and “multi-modal” video analysis in particular. Second, a tutorial example is offered to demonstrate how the approach, when developed in a stepwise manner, makes it possible to recover a technical practice in its constitutive accountability. Finally, initial attempts to introduce practice-based video analysis in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Conversation Analysis (CA) are reflected upon in terms of the contrasting disciplinary politics that these attempts have disclosed and may disclose – be it at the pub, in peer review, or at conference presentations.

Practicing Innovation: Mobile Nano-training, Emerging Tensions, and Prospective Arrangements

This chapter is based upon on a small set of narrative interviews with mobile graduate students in the nanosciences. It examines how they conducted and reported upon their respective projects “abroad” (at selected UK and US institutions) for them to count as satisfactory expressions of research practice “at home” (at a Swiss public university). In doing so, the chapter homes in on the local configuration of new research fields from the perspective of its (potential) future members. Particular emphasis is placed on how “mobile nano-training” at MA level was conducted and reported upon in project format. The analytic focus, more specifically, is on how mobile nano-training – via project work, its emerging tensions and prospective arrangements – afforded its participants with an instructive model of research practice in the intended domains of nanoscience: how did they, its novice practitioners, “socialize” themselves into the inter- and transdisciplinary research field(s) they were expected to staff? In taking up this question, the chapter ties the theme of a field’s novelty back to its novices’ practical inquiries, thus avoiding any master narrative of its “radical novelty”, “changing nature”, or “essential tensions”. The chapter, instead, is cast as a reflexive ethno-inquiry (Carlin, Qual Res 9:331–354, 2009; Slack, Ethnogr Stud 5:1–26, 2000).

Configuring New Research Fields: How Policy, Place, and Organization Are Made to Matter

Contemporary science is typically conceived as an international endeavor. Especially the natural and technical sciences are seen as internationally constituted with their adoption of English as a lingua franca as well as widespread cooperation and mobility of researchers across national borders and continents. Such an international perspective on science, however, should not neglect that the configuration of individual research fields may vary considerably between locations, regions, and national contexts. Variation is particularly noticeable in the case of research fields in their nascent and early stages such as current nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and the neurosciences. It is this locally specific character of new research fields and how they come into being that this chapter and the present volume move into the spotlight.