Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and ANT Brad King Design and Methodology in Communication Research Fall

 Life After Method: Enacting Social Science Research  What is ethnomethodology anyway?: Garfinkel’s California Sociology  Ethnography and the Ethics of Closeness  Latour’s ANT farm: A Sociology of Translations 2

 Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. 3

 The problem is not the method. It’s our method of understanding the method…  Ways of knowing are always political  Social scientists must understand that their methodology doesn’t just describe the world, it enacts it  E.g. an IQ test, political polling  Methods are performative 4

 The Rules of Sociological Method “the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon.” 5

 The Rules of Sociological Method: Marx, Durkheim, Weber 6

 A method or theory? A Method for Studying other people’s methods.  According to Garfinkel, the objective is to "understand the rational accountability of practical actions as an ongoing practical accomplishment."  He is also concerned with three constituent phenomena: 1) The establishment of objective (context-free) propositions in place of indexical ones. 2) The essential task of reflexivity that accounts for practical actions -otherwise considered banal and generally un- remarkable. 3) Examining actions in-context as a practical accomplishment. 7

 1) opening up the field of inquiry  2) The persistence of rationality  3) it is methodologically inadequate to assume that the properties of rationality can be ascertained by referring to apriori standards that exist outside of the community of actors 8

 Fine refers to the "illusions" which are sometimes foisted upon ethnographers as they go about their research.  The objective is not to suggest that ethics and ethnography are incompatible 9

 1) Lies which conflict with "classical virtues" of ethnographers (Strategic Closeness)  2) technical challenges which take the form of practical problems concerning method (Technical Closeness)  3) Challenges concerning the "ethnographic self“ (Reflexive Closeness) 10

 Law and Urry (2004) argue that social science methodology is not only descriptive but performative  the epistemological and ontological assumptions on which such practice sits are fundamentally related to experience. 11

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 If social science is concerned with discovering truth then the epistemological implications of practice become ontological and political.  Thus it is nearly impossible for a social science to be apolitical or "neutral." 15

 Reassembling “the Social”  - the nature of groups and identity  -the nature of goal oriented action and it's complications  - the nature of objects  - The nature of facts  - sociology and it's articulation as an empirical science. 16

 ANT’s core principle is symmetry (overcoming the Subject/Object dualism)  Extension of ethnographic methods into socio- material contexts 17

 Alan Sokal’s SocialText “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”  Social Text #46/47, pp (spring/summer 1996).  Politics, Ethics, and “Science” 18

 Durkheim, E. (1982). The Rules of Sociological Method. (S. Lukes, Ed., & W. Halls, Trans.) London: MacMillan.  Fine, G. A. (1993). Ten lies of ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22, pp  Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology's Programme. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.  Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.  Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Latour, B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. (C. Porter, Trans.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.  Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.  Law, J., & Urry, J. (2004). Enacting the Social. Economy and Society, 33 (3),