(In)appropriate Methods in the Space of Interaction

• In Event: Situating Methods

Abstract

My research investigates how neuroscientific models of social cognition are enacted and maintained through routine laboratory practices, with a particular interest in how such models are taken up pragmatically through the design and staging of experiments. My theater-based approach also affords practical ways to interrogate the narrative possibilities for subjects who participate in such experiments: how do experiments require and limit the participation of these subjects? What modes of expression do experiments afford for subjects, and how do subjects take these up to navigate their roles as, for example, a “child with autism” in the experimental performance space of the laboratory experiment?

Years of making experimental theater taught me that everything—not only actors but the physical space, the lights, the particular confluence of people and their expectations—everything mattered for the evocation of experiences and meanings in performance. It is was this experiential mode of theatrical knowing that oriented me to the dramaturgy of laboratory experiments, and which underlies my conviction that the seemingly incommensurable experimentality of theater and science can only be addressed through a practical involvement with both.

While some of my work describes existing laboratory practices, the majority of my “critical” work happens in dialogue with cognitive neuroscience. In response to the panel’s interest in the pragmatics of experimental design in respect to commitments about what situated methods might be, here I would like to contribute to the discussion a recent project that takes an engaged, theatrical, collaborative approach to expand expressive possibilities in laboratory experiments on social cognition.

Author

• Yelena Gluzman, UC San Diego