What goes on at a CoLED workshop?

Yelena Gluzman (UC San Diego) reflects on the March workshop at UC Davis in a post on the Society for Social Studies of Science website’s Backchannels blog. Recalling a segment of the workshop led by Joe Dumit, she writes:

In one exercise, each of us was instructed to secretly select two people in the group. Without revealing who they were, we had to keep the first person to our right, and the second person to our left. Following these rules instantly put the entire group into movement, first at a walk, and then accelerating (despite ourselves) to a run, with group members veering as they tried to maintain their position in relation to their chosen two.

In another exercise, the groups received a different score. Small groups were sent outside with the instruction to find an object and bring it back to present to everyone. Upon returning, workshop organizers prompted participants to write down everything we recalled about the expedition other than the object we chose.

In both cases, the scores were ways to attune to the process of observation without separating ourselves as observers from the emergent action in which we were embedded. Instead of bracketing the embodied and situated condition of participant-observation, these scores highlighted ways in which embodied experience could be available as part of a research object.

Read more – and see photos – here.