For more than four decades STS researchers have investigated how technoscience produces knowledge and moves and distributes artefacts such as scientific papers, instruments and standards around the world. In contrast, very little attention has been granted to the socio-material practices of knowledge construction and dissemination in the social sciences and humanities. This article reports a two-month field study among a group a psychologists in a university department. The author describes the psychologists’ peculiar mode of knowledge production which differs significantly from the common practices in the natural sciences.
Two excerpts from the article:
“As soon as I began to observe the group more closely, I realised that their knowledge practices had at least three peculiar features which set them apart from natural sciences. These peculiarities could all be related to the role played by concepts. First, it struck me that concepts did not arrive at the late stage of a translation process as the final summation of a long series of translations. In the case of these psychologists, concepts came into play almost immediately; when the psychologists were in contact with a field such as a school or a treatment institution, they would, for instance, comment on the “subjectivity” or the “self-reflection” of the people they encountered. Second, concepts were not the scientists’ exclusively owned tools; a significant part of the concepts were shared with and used by therapists, social workers, school teachers, and other professional practitioners who worked in institutions of various kinds. Third, the psychologists in the SUBSTANce project seemed to presume that concepts require a special kind of effort—an effort they alluded to when they said that concepts needed to be “clarified” or “reflected upon.” Concepts, in the case of the psychologists, were therefore not merely well-established, conventional forms such as the classification system for plants. “
“The group and the broader network of cultural-historical psychology and critical psychology it grew out of have spent decades experimenting with how to construct knowledge, external relations, and researcher subjects in situations where mutual entanglement is not only unavoidable, but also the very means through which knowledge is created and interventions are made. This is precisely what I believe might be of value to others.“
Read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0959354319853630