Sharon Traweek

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When experimentalists present papers at seminars and conferences, they always begin with a detailed description of their detector and devote at least a third of their talks to these machines before introducing the data generated in their experiments and reporting how those data were analyzed in order to produce "curves" (interpretations which have an acceptable degree of "fit" with the data). [...] It is the theorist who is more likely to see detectors as scientific instruments which simply record nature, as transcription devices which themselves leave no trace.

— Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists [13]

For experimentalists, particle detectors are proof of their skill as scientists; whereas theorists are more likely to minimize how the specifics of detectors shape the data or the scientific process. [6]

Traweek includes voices not usually included in discussions of knowledge production in physics, such as women physicists in Japan or the trajectory of postdocs who are not hired to continue work in high energy physics after years of investment in the profession. One Japanese woman, Traweek describes, found ways to perform physics research without funding by acquiring data through her ties with a large multinational research group by asking for a dataset that was known to be interesting, but not the most desirable. [14] She studies the ways physicists and astronomers worldwide learn to work together on addressing loss of funding or expansion in their research facilities. In the mid 1980s, the high energy physic facility in Japan, KEK, mushroomed because construction of TRISTAN (Transposable Ring Intersecting Storage Accelerator in Nippon) was completed. The lab director-general relayed to Traweek that it was named after Wagner’s opera, “with the love and dreams for our science research.” Peopling Traweek’s account of this expansion are the Japanese researchers who commuted back to Tokyo every weekend because they didn’t want their children to go to local schools, the local man who navigated the bureaucracies of auto rental on behalf of foreign researchers, wives of Japanese researchers who wrote a visitors guide for foreigners, and graduate students from around Asia who didn’t think they had developed long term research relationships with the Japanese research professors. [15] Looking at strategic uses of national, regional, class, & gender differences throughout her work, Traweek explores the ethics, aesthetics, and narrative strategies of physicists and their social environments. [9]

Since 2009, Traweek has turned her attention to the ways digital data practices are changing and shaping scholarship, such as the development of new digital modes of scholarly communication and diverse styles of digital knowledge making. She studies new digital strategies to audit and evaluate scholarship, and then to allocate resources for scholarship. [9]

Criticism

Conventional science theorists find it controversial to include social structures of scientific practice as part of a conception of science. In contrast to Traweek and social constructionists who describe these cultural nuances, conventional theorists prefer to focus only on the cognitive content or “laws of nature”. [16] Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge criticized Traweek for a passage that calls attention to genital metaphor in the naming of scientific instruments at SLAC. Koertge states that this passage is Freudian and distracts readers from Traweek's serious work. Koertge suggests that the study of gender in science aims to undermines scientific discourse. [17]

Sociologist David Bloor, a proponent of the "strong programme" in the sociology of scientific knowledge, criticized Traweek's work as providing "no detailed description of the content of the physicist's knowledge in her book" and for making "somewhat inflated claims for her data and the significance of her findings." [18] Bloor's criticism echoed the earlier judgments of philosopher Bruno Latour, a leading practitioner of science and technology studies, who found that "in spite of her claim to 'thick description', Traweek is unable to relate the contents of physics to the social organization." [19]

Books

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<i>Beamtimes and Lifetimes</i> 1988 book by Sharon Traweek

Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists is a book by Sharon Traweek on cultural anthropology and the sociology of science among people in the field of particle physics. It is an ethnography of high energy physicists that chronicles the laboratories, career paths, and values of a community of scientists based on her observations at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, US, and KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan.

References

  1. ↑ Traweek, Sharon (1982). Uptime, downtime, spacetime, and power: an ethnography of the particle physics community in Japan and the United States (Ph.D thesis). OCLC   680612278.
  2. ↑ Latour, Bruno; Woolgar, Steve (1986) [1979], "Postscript to second edition (1986)", in Latour, Bruno; Woolgar, Steve (eds.), Laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, pp. 273–286, ISBN   9780691094182. Originally published 1979 in Los Angeles, by SAGE Publications
  3. ↑ Rosser, Sue V. (2004), "Life in the lab", in Rosser, Sue V. (ed.), The science glass ceiling: academic women scientists and the struggle to succeed, New York, New York: Routledge, pp. 45–46, ISBN   9780415945134.
  4. ↑ "Profile: Sharon Traweek". ResearchGate .
  5. ↑ "Google Scholar".
  6. 1 2 Traweek, S. (1988). Beamtimes and lifetimes. Harvard University Press.
  7. ↑ "Sharon Traweek".
  8. ↑ "4S Prizes". www.4sonline.org. Archived from the original on 2011-06-13.
  9. 1 2 3 4 "Sharon Traweek". LinkedIn .[ user-generated source ]
  10. ↑ Gee, James Paul (2014). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-317-82057-4.[ page needed ]
  11. ↑ Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge University Press. p 12.
  12. ↑ "Ethnographic Studies of Science - Sociology of Science - iResearchNet".
  13. ↑ Traweek, Sharon (1992), "Epilogue: Knowledge and passion", in Traweek, Sharon, ed. (30 June 2009). Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. p. 160. ISBN   9780674044449.
  14. ↑ Aronowitz, Stanley (1996). Technoscience and Cyberculture. Psychology Press. ISBN   978-0-415-91176-4.
  15. ↑ Marcus, George E. (April 1995). Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs. University of Chicago Press. ISBN   978-0-226-50444-5.
  16. ↑ Harding, Sandra G (1994). "Is Science Multicultural?: Challenges, Resources, Opportunities, Uncertainties". Configurations. 2 (2): 301–330. doi:10.1353/con.1994.0019. S2CID   144296114. Project MUSE   8039.
  17. ↑ Quote: "The language used by physicists about and around detectors is genita: the imagery of the names SPEAR, SLAC, and PEP is clear as is the reference to the "beam" as "up" or "down." [...] One must see the magnets at LASS to appreciate the labial associations in the detector's name, Large Aperture Solenoid Spectrometer [...] Ironically, the denial of human agency in the construction of science coexists with the imaging of scientists as male and nature as female [...] Detectors are the site of their coupling: standing on the massive, throbbing body of the eighty-two-inch bubble chamber at SLAC while watching the accelerated particles from the beam collide twice a second with the superheated hydrogen molecules made this quite clear." – Traweek, p. 158 (1992)
  18. ↑ Bloor, David (1999). "Anti-Latour". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A . 30 (1): 81–112. doi:10.1016/s0039-3681(98)00038-7. PMID   11623976.
  19. ↑ Latour, Bruno (1990). "Postmodern? No, simply amodern! Steps towards the anthropology of science". Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A . 21 (1): 145–171. Bibcode:1990SHPSA..21..145L. doi:10.1016/0039-3681(90)90018-4.
Sharon Traweek
Born
Sharon Jean Traweek
Academic background
Alma mater University of California at Santa Cruz
Thesis Uptime, downtime, spacetime, and power: an ethnography of the particle physics community in Japan and the United States  (1982)
Influences Robert O. Paxton, Vartan Gregorian, Hayden White and Gregory Bateson
International
National
Academics
Other
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