This essay is a remembrance and also a reminder of Harold Garfinkel's contributions to science studies. Garfinkel is best known as the founder of ethnomethodology, the sociological investigation of ...the production and coordination of 'methods' in non-scientific as well as scientific settings. In addition to studying the tacit organization of everyday activities, Garfinkel and his students also investigated practices in the natural and social sciences that elude formal methodological prescriptions and reports. Garfinkel's work sometimes is acknowledged as a precursor to early ethnographies of scientific laboratories, but this essay argues that his conceptual and methodological innovations continue to have a pervasive, though often unacknowledged, place in science and technology studies and related fields.
In this paper we re-examine the implications of the differences between 'doing' and 'writing' science and mathematics, questioning whether the way that science and mathematics are presented in ...textbooks or research articles creates a misleading picture of these differences. We focus our discussion on mathematics, in particular on Reuben Hersh's formulation of the contrast in terms of Goffman's dramaturgical frontstage—backstage analogy and his claim that various myths about mathematics only fit with how mathematics is presented in the 'front', but not with how it is practised in the 'back'. By investigating examples of both the 'front' (graduate lectures in mathematical logic) and the 'back' (meetings between supervisor and doctoral students) we examine, first, whether the 'front' of mathematics presents a misleading picture of mathematics, and, second, whether the 'front' and 'back' of mathematics are so discrepant that mathematics really does look certain in the 'front', but fallible in the 'back'.
This study contributes to social studies of imaging and visualization practices within scientific and medical settings. The focus is on practices in radiology, which are bound up with visual records ...known as radiographs. The study addresses work following the introduction of a new imaging technology, tomosynthesis. Since it was a novel technology, there was limited knowledge of how to correctly analyse tomosynthesis images. To address this problem, a collective review session was arranged. The purpose of the present study was to uncover the practical work that took place during that session and to show how, and on what basis, new methods, interpretations and understandings were being generated. The analysis displays how the diagnostic work on patients' bodies was grounded in two sets of technologically produced renderings. This shows how expertise is not simply a matter of providing correct explanations, but also involves discovery work in which visual renderings are made transparent. Furthermore, the results point to how the disciplinary knowledge is intertwined with timely actions, which in turn, partly rely on established practices of manipulating and comparing images. The embodied and situated reasoning that enabled radiologists to discern objects in the images thus display expertise as inherently practical and domain-specific.
Counselors were relatively more challenging, thematically focused, and here-and-now oriented in the improving dyads than in the continuing-poor alliance dyads. (Abstract amended)
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