Short abstract:

This talk on the rigor and reproducibility reform movement will argue that this movement is not necessarily generating new social forms, but is shifting the conditions of possibility of scientific work in ways that make some forms more prevalent than others.

Long abstract:

This talk on the rigor and reproducibility reform movement will argue that this movement is not necessarily generating new social forms, but is shifting the conditions of possibility of scientific work in ways that make some forms more prevalent than others, and in doing so create new epistemic risks. Together with the rise of audit culture and pressure from industry to more closely integrate academic research, initiatives from the reproducibility reform movement are tipping the scales towards collective and more homogeneous forms of scientific work. This pattern tracks in some respects with the trajectory of the Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) reform movement, which took individual variation as a problem to be solved and invented new knowledge tools to make this variation visible (and therefore amenable to intervention). But the reproducibility reform movement also departs in significant ways from EBM, most notably how each movement conceptualizes the role of producers and users of knowledge. I will argue that the reproducibility reform movement is epistemically risker than EBM because it aims to standardize not just knowledge users but knowledge producers.