Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Timo Roßmann
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Markus Rudolfi (Goehte-University Frankfurt am Main)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We invite scholars to talk about those curious stories we decide to leave untold as we transform our fieldwork experiences into text. We explore such confessed omissions as part of the construction of a common sense and speculate about what parallel stories their inclusion might have produced.
Long Abstract:
This panel is a stage for confessional stories from our empirical projects. We invite STS researchers to tell us about those vibrant situations, encounters, relationships, people, or materials that are part of the research process but get ‘lost in transformation’ as we compose our fieldwork experiences for more conventional academic formats. Such untold stories wouldn't rest easy on us because our sensitivity and curiosity in STS recognizes potential we eventually did not pursue. We seek to reflect upon these omissions as possible effects of our engagement with theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and the representational politics to which we adhere.
For that matter, we ask for your contributions in the form of STS confessions: Which stories have you suspended in the sake of producing a superseding story that is more focused, coherent, or compelling? Which stories have you sacrificed, perhaps uneasily, given the expectations of interlocutors, colleagues, supervisors, or against the prospects of publication? We are keen for your contributions to engender a speculative moment (Haraway 2016; Stengers 2018a, 2018b), thus we also invite you to share what other work you imagine your text would have become if you had included these stories after all.
With this experimental and speculative ‘STS confessions’ panel format, we want to ignite one of many conversations to follow, not only on the mechanics of making and un-making data and the conceptual logics of using and discarding field stories but also on knowledge economies prompting us to un-tell such stories and at what costs we do so. We argue that a confessional and speculative engagement with the stories we discard is part and parcel of making and doing transformations – it lets us explore how we construct and how we would like to construct ethnographic common sense in STS.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nima Madjzubi
Short abstract:
Based on failure of access to a field and a critical/textual success, the author argues that critical distance and constructive approaches are not just matters of methodical debate and exclusive choice but are variables relating to other relations, distant or proximate, accessible or inaccessible.
Long abstract:
This paper tells a story of an MA thesis fieldwork that did not happen. Having failed to access a bioacoustics laboratory, the student resorted to liquidate his preparations into a textual analysis of a laboratory's publication. This analysis turned out to be "critical" in spite of the "constructive" stance taken in advance. This failure enables the author to put critique and construction, and relatedly theory and practice, into spatial, historical, and intersectional relations: that of field access. What determined the lack of field access, resulting in "critical distance," was the distance of the student ethnographer from his institution, his migration background and lack of relevant networks, and unfamiliarity/distance of the laboratory's investigator with STS, among other factors.
The critical paper was critical because, from the distance at which the laboratory's text was read, it allowed itself to be read without other relations with laboratory's actors while affording what one can do with an accessible text. The author argues that being critical or being constructive are not only attitudes and disciplinary rules, neither are theory and practice separate things to be connected. Critical distance and proximity are not exclusively matters of methodical choice. Critic's "privileged position" can no longer be assumed. They involve the risk of access, which among others involves matters of credence, privilege, and security. In conclusion, critique and construction, and by implication theory (textual practice) and practice (articulations in general), become variables and indicators of distance and access, overriding the assumption that they are oppositional or contradictory.
Cornelia Hummel (University of Geneva) Marie Bieler (University of Geneva)
Short abstract:
As part of a research project on the materialities of ageing, this paper focuses on the avoidance behaviour of the researchers during interviews conducted in the homes of frail elderly people, particularly in bathrooms and toilets.
Long abstract:
The 'Aging Humans, Changing Homes' project focusses on how elderly people’s homes change with the introduction of assistive devices and other daily living support objects. The fieldwork consists of home visits during which the researcher conducts a “home touring” interview and takes photographs of the assistive devices and their use, as well as the mundane objects used in daily life. The aim is to study how humans and objects cooperate (or not) in daily routines, and we ask people to tell us about the story of these objects (why and how did they enter the home) and their story with them.
Certain objects, such as the bath board or the raised toilet seat, are located in rooms that are, on the one hand, places of bodily intimacy and, on the other, identified by professionals working in the field of “ageing in place” as places of danger. During the drafting of the research design, the study of these places was obvious, but during fieldwork asking questions about certain objects appeared to be difficult. The further we went from the visitor area (living room) to the intimate spaces (bedroom, bathroom), the more our very human discomfort got in the way of scientific questioning, and the researcher hesitated: does she really want to hear the story of the raised toilet seat?
At the end of the fieldwork, team discussions turned into confessions about words that we had avoided collecting, and therefore avoided transcribing, with various pretexts, more or less consciously.
Violet Petit-Steeghs (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Gili Yaron (Windesheim University of Applied Sciences)
Short abstract:
By presenting our untold story of developing a meta-perspective on ‘innovative’ healthcare concepts as linguistic technologies, we will reflect on the in-betweenness within this process. In between strictly regimented tasks, we carved out an uneasy space in between STS and healthcare sciences.
Long abstract:
In our ethnographies of the past years, we have—separately—focused on the uptake of three ‘innovative’ healthcare concepts: patient-centered care, vitality, and positive health. Following a chance meeting, we started developing a common meta-perspective on the tensions that arise when such ‘linguistic technologies’ (Dehue, 2023) are implemented in practice to improve healthcare. Almost incidentally, we decided to co-author an article on this topic for an important group of stakeholders in our fieldwork: health scientists and policy makers. In this article, we problematize the simplistic view of ‘implementation’ commonly held in healthcare—a view that ignores the ontological, normative (Greenhalgh et al., 2023), and relational complexities inherent to implementation processes. For two years now, we have been developing the text. Tinkering with content and form, mixing sources, trying out methodologies and genres, we are thus carving out an uneasy space in between STS and healthcare sciences. Meanwhile, we are also carving out time for these interdisciplinary reflections in between strictly regimented projects, responsibilities, and tasks. In its most recent guise, we frame our yet-untold story as a synthesis of STS insights and show our audience-to-be how a more constructive approach to implementation can be established which recognizes and furthers the circulation of various types of knowledge at play in science, policy, and practice. In our panel contribution, we will reflect on what in-betweenness means for our own work as well as for how we engage with our non-STS significant others.
Camilla Addey (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Short abstract:
In this presentation, I explore how we deal with uncomfortable data. I explore three stories from my elite policy research to discuss: 1) How do we establish what counts as data? and 2) What are the ethics of withholding or revealing data that make us feel uncomfortable?
Long abstract:
'Let me tell you about my boss! No, I will forward the email so you can see yourself. You can write about it! The process is corrupt, you will see in the email!'. As I completed the interview with a high-level official at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), I returned home and opened my emails. There it was. I read the email many times: it was not the data I was seeking, I am not an investigative journalist but a scholar seeking to unpack how the process of global contracting within international organizations was shaping the way education is measured globally. Eventually, I decided to never disclose its contents; but I knew the story and could not unlearn it; it became part of my understanding of the process I was studying. How do we manage the process of establishing what is data and how do we set thresholds about what counts as data and what does not?
In this presentation, I seek to explore how we deal with uncomfortable data, something I have engaged with in elite policy research. Drawing on the work by Addey and Piattoeva (2022), which explores the intimate and messy practice of methods, I explore three stories from my research journey to discuss: 1) How does the data gathering process constitute and reveal our scholarly identities?; 2) How do we establish what counts as data?; and 3) What are the ethics of withholding or revealing data that makes us feel uncomfortable?