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Ontologies, Epistemologies and the Ethics of Commonsense

Ontologies, Epistemologies and the Ethics of Commonsense. Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and ANT Brad King Design and Methodology in Communication Research Fall 2008. Agenda. Life After Method: Enacting Social Science Research

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Ontologies, Epistemologies and the Ethics of Commonsense

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  1. Ontologies, Epistemologies and the Ethics of Commonsense Ethnography, Ethnomethodology, and ANT Brad King Design and Methodology in Communication Research Fall 2008

  2. Agenda 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

  3. Messing with People’s Heads Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.

  4. Messing with People’s Heads • 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

  5. Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism The Rules of Sociological Method “the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon.”

  6. The Philosophy of Social Science in (About 2 Minutes) The Rules of Sociological Method: Marx, Durkheim, Weber

  7. What is Ethnomethodology Anyway? • 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.

  8. Ethnomethodology’s Programme 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

  9. Ethics and Ethnography 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

  10. The Ethics of Closeness • 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)

  11. Do you believe in “Reality”? • 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.

  12. What is “Truth” • 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."

  13. The Sociology of Translations: Latour’s ANT farm • 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.

  14. Touring Latour • ANT’s core principle is symmetry • (overcoming the Subject/Object dualism) • Extension of ethnographic methods into socio-material contexts

  15. Science Wars • Alan Sokal’s SocialText • “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” • Social Text#46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). • Politics, Ethics, and “Science”

  16. References 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. 267-294. 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), 390-410. 

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