Paper long abstract:

The paper draws on a two-month field study of group of so-called cultural-historical psychologists working at a Danish University. Rather than producing science in the shape of an increasingly long chain of circulating references (Latour 1999; 2013), the group develops a stream of perspectives and concepts that may contribute positively and constructively to the interactions between actors entangled in social and psychological problems. A crucial feature of the psychologists' concepts is that they constantly risk becoming a part of the problem rather than a part of the solution. For this reason, the concepts must be developed and used with an elaborate sense of the problematic interactional situations in which problems unfold.

This type of sense, which the psychologists often refer to as 'being reflexive' is largely invisible in the current accounts of good science. It has no scientometric measure and it is not a value that fits easily into accounts of science as circulating references.

The aim of this paper is to take steps toward making maps or a metric of science on which the cultural-historical psychologists will become visible. For this purpose the Actor Network Text Analyser (ANTA) will be used on various selections of material to trace how the psychologists and their collaborators develop and elaborate their sensitivity to interactional entanglements.