Interpretation as intervention in science and technology studies: revisiting methods as epistemic practices

Abstract

Science and technology studies (STS) scholarship explores the production and institutional contexts of scientific knowledge. As such, it has examined research methods in both the natural and social sciences, framing such methods as necessarily intervening in the worlds they describe and explore. We discuss central concepts that STS mobilizes to engage with methods, in particular by introducing the notion of the “method assemblage” and its implications for interpretive methods. In doing so, we draw on our academic work to describe key ways in which STS has characterized research methods and to discuss what this might mean for other accounts of interpretive approaches. We argue that, as with any other method assemblage, interpretive methods can be understood as performative epistemic practices that enact the worlds – social, natural, political, and historical – that they purport to describe.