Analyzing the Analyst: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental Performances, and a Return to Reflexivity

• In Event: How Do STS Studies Translate Numbers: Knowledge, Theory, Method

Abstract

On the question of “How do STS Analyses Translate the Doing of Scientific Knowledge,” the literature on STS methods of the late 1990s and early 2000s was clear: the doing of STS had to be radically rethought in order to foreground symmetrical and reflexive attention to the conditions of production and performative effects of their own research methods (Law and Singleton , Mol 2002, Law 2004). While STS methods have indeed proliferated in the decades following (as attested to by the popular Making & Doing session at 4S), fewer have pursued the practical question of how STS scholars might center their own practices alongside those of the communities and phenomena they study. This paper addresses this question through doing (and considering through doing) a reflexive, experimental STS research paradigm. Though this project does not explicitly deal with numbers, it pursues the issue of qualification and quantification in both its methodological design and its central question, one shared by myself and the cognitive neuroscientist with whom I was collaborating: how can a continuous, dynamic phenomenon like human interaction be rendered computational while keeping sight of situated meaning-making as it emerges? Taking seriously a ludic proposition, we videotaped ourselves as we attempted to analyze videos of spontaneous interactions. Subsequently, I transcribed and re-staged our acts of analysis with theater actors, looking at the resources we drew upon to re-member the interactions to be performed. In presenting our findings, I argue that coding and systemization do not exist apart from the embodied performances that shape and re-animate them, and that these efforts both to quantify and qualitatively interpret are in the service of making elusive phenomena available and actionable.

Author

• Yelena Gluzman, UCSD