Science, Technology, & Human Values

37(2) 264-285
ª The Author(s) 2012
In/Visibilities of Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Research: Seeing DOI: 10.1177/0162243911409248
http://sthv.sagepub.com

and Knowing
in STS

Lisa Garforth1

Abstract
In science studies the laboratory has been positioned as a privileged place
for understanding scientific practice. Laboratory studies foregrounded
local spaces of knowledge production in the natural sciences, and in doing
so made the laboratory key to social science epistemologies. This article
explores how laboratory studies and observational methods have been
tied up together in the science and technology studies (STS) project of
making scientific practice visible. The author contrasts powerful rhetorics
of witnessing and revelation in some significant STS texts with the nego-
tiated and partial ways in which observing science work is done in social
science practice. Drawing on empirical material generated with bioscien-
tists and social scientists, the article explores how researchers may resist
the observational gaze and mark aspects of knowledge work as private and
solitary. The author concludes by arguing that epistemologies of vision
point to some unsettling parallels between the study of knowledge-
making in STS and audit regimes in contemporary research, and considers
how both might devalue invisible work. This analysis suggests that there is

1
Politics and Sociology, School of Geography, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

Corresponding Author:
Lisa Garforth, Politics and Sociology, School of Geography, Claremont Bridge Building,
Claremont Road, Newcastle NE1 7RU, UK
Email: Lisa.garforth@ncl.ac.uk
Garforth 265

a need to reconsider the significance of thinking in the ensemble of

knowledge production practices for methodological, epistemological, and
strategic reasons.

Keywords
epistemology, methodologies, methods, space/place/scale dynamics

Introduction
In this article, I explore the value of invisibility to science and technology
studies (STS). I argue that the centrality of the laboratory study in STS has
led to the foregrounding of visible, active practices in understanding how
knowledge is made. I want to show that one consequence of the dominance
of observational methods and rhetorics of witnessing in STS has been a ten-
dency to mirror contemporary research policies in their insistence that what
counts in science is solely that which can be seen, whether in terms of
research outputs or research activity. Attending to how seeing is accom-
plished in situated studies of science, as well as explicitly marking what
goes unseen, can open up new avenues of enquiry. My analysis draws on
recent contributions to STS that have emphasized the need to move out
of the laboratory and explore new epistemic spaces that are characterized
as diffuse, mobile, and hybrid. They call for the extension and reformula-
tion of the canonical lab study methodology, both to acknowledge the
increasingly virtual and multisited nature of contemporary epistemic net-
works (Beaulieu 2004, 2010; Hess 2001; Hine 2007), and to develop the
focus on plural and situated ontologies of knowledge-objects that permeates
recent studies of technology and medicine (de Laet and Mol 2000; Mol
2002; Mol and Law 2004). Unlike these studies, however, I stay in the
laboratory and in analogous sites in the nonnatural sciences. Thinking about
other epistemic spaces is not just a matter of finding new places to go, but
includes reevaluating existing ones.
With this in mind, I focus on exploring some unexamined assumptions
that have tied together seeing and knowing in the laboratory to produce
powerful claims in STS. I begin by establishing the centrality of the visual
to epistemologies in the recent history of constructivist STS, in particular
the importance of rhetorical appeals to witnessing and revelation in assem-
bling authoritative accounts of ‘‘being there’’ in the texts of laboratory eth-
nographies (Geertz 1988, 1). In the second part of the article, I contrast
these robust and persuasive accounts of witnessing practice with a reflexive
266 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

exploration of my own fragmented and inconclusive participant observation

with bioscientists and social scientists in a UK university, highlighting
some tensions and blind spots in lab ethnographies. Drawing on data (and
non-data) generated as part of the KNOWING (Knowledge, Institutions and
Gender: An East-West Comparative Study) project, a mixed-methods
qualitative study of knowledge- and gender-in-the-making,1 I explore
researchers’ discomfort with and withdrawal from observation to highlight
routines of still and silent thinking work and the spatial and interpersonal
arrangements that support them in the laboratory and the office.
In the final section, I develop arguments that in/visibility is not simply a
matter of what is (not) there to be seen. Seeing is dynamic and practiced in
the social science field, and as such its negotiation and management has
consequences for our understanding of the ethnographic gaze and what is
at stake in observational methods. I point to the unsettling ways in which
elements of the practice turn in STS echo the emphasis on output and activ-
ity in contemporary research policies, discussing the discourses and tech-
nologies of assessment in the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)
as an example. I argue that what goes missing in both these approaches
to epistemic production is an acknowledgment of the importance of solitary
thinking work. A number of voices in STS over the last 10 years have called
for a critical reevaluation of the ‘‘black-boxing’’ of cognition in Latourian
science studies (Nerssesian 2005, 17-8), drawing on insights from cognitive
science and studies of distributed cognition to situate thinking as a practice
that takes place in rich material and cultural environments (Giere and
Moffatt 2003; Gooding 2006; Gorman et al. 2005; Nerssesian 2005). Few,
however, acknowledge the audit contexts of work in contemporary aca-
demic cultures, or attend reflexively to the meaning for practicing research-
ers of making time and space to think alone. In these contexts, I argue, a
reevaluation of thinking in STS accounts of knowledge-making is not just
an ontological challenge but a strategic necessity.

Knowing in the Laboratory: Witnessing, Revelation

and the Practice Turn
It is now old news that in the 1980s science studies took a sharp turn toward
‘‘studying scientific practice, what scientists actually do’’ (Pickering 1992,
2) and witnessing ‘‘science in action’’ (Latour 1987). Looking inside the lab
enabled analysts to show that science is a matter of ordinary practice rather
than a special, inaccessible form of cognition. Physical and social entry into
a laboratory enabled access to the daily routines of scientists and their
Garforth 267

practical, collective concerns. Thus, debates about the philosophy and

methodology of science were superseded by detailed attention to local
material and cultural activity, which in turn produced powerful new
ideas about how knowledge is made. In this shift, the laboratory
becomes more than just a site, space, or container of scientific activity,
but part of practice in itself (Beaulieu 2010). Making scientific knowl-
edge involves not just human action but networks that include the capa-
cities and resistances of materials and machines; thus, the laboratory
itself is reimagined as ‘‘an agent of scientific development’’ (Knorr
Cetina 2001, 144).
In positioning the laboratory as a privileged actor in scientific
knowledge-making, laboratory studies also made it central to social studies
of science. An ‘‘exemplary site’’ where experimental work is on show and
black boxes remain open, the lab has certainly been methodologically con-
venient (Sismondo 2004, 86). But it has also been epistemologically crucial.
In seminal studies, the laboratory is not just where but how social scientists
come to know about natural sciences, through the intimate relationship
between laboratory studies, practice, and constructivism. The description
of what really goes on in laboratories—the careful scrutiny and compelling
revelation of the ‘‘intricate labour,’’ the ‘‘countless nonsolid ingredients,’’
the endless processes of ‘‘confusion and negotiation’’ that constitute a
‘‘fact’’ (Knorr Cetina 2001, 148)—has furnished science studies with its
distinctive approach. Put simply, ‘‘[d]etailed description deconstructs’’
(Knorr Cetina 2001, 148). In Laboratory Life, Latour and Woolgar argue
that their account of the construction of facts has been assembled in more
or less the same way as those of the scientists they study and is no more
or less fictional. The ontological effects of science, however, are amplified
by one crucial difference: ‘‘they have a laboratory’’ (1986, 257). My argu-
ment here is that constructionist science studies have also claimed the
laboratory, not just as an object of knowledge or a space in which to observe
but as part of the epistemic material of their own claims. Just as natural
scientists act on and with scripts, materials, methods, and machines, so does
the ethnographic researcher act on and with her assembled research sub-
jects, inscription devices and traces, also in the laboratory.
Hine (2007) points out that the canonical texts of laboratory ethnographies
have had particular rhetorical powers in shaping science studies’ epistemol-
ogy. It is above all through scripting the laboratory into text that laboratory
ethnographies became ‘‘highly potent objects for the development of theoreti-
cal interventions in the sociology of scientific knowledge’’ (Hine 2007, 653).
As Latour’s own work would predict, in the assemblage that makes up
268 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

contemporary STS, Laboratory Life is as significant as laboratory life. The lab

study genre makes much of rejecting scientists’ and philosophers’ accounts of
the discovery of facts in favor of looking at practice in real time. Lab studies
stand or fall upon the argument that they begin with ‘‘what scientists do’’ and
not ‘‘what they say (discourse or theory)’’ (Zammito 2004, 151). Writings from
the early years of laboratory studies are dense with visual metaphors as the fol-
lowing examples show:

To put the point bluntly, relatively few sociologists of science have bothered
to go and see for themselves what actually goes on in science . . . (Woolgar
1982, 482; emphasis added).
Now that field studies of laboratory practices are starting to pour in, we are
beginning to have a better picture of what scientists do inside the walls of
these strange places called ‘‘laboratories’’ . . . we first of all had to penetrate
these black boxes, and to get firsthand observations of the daily activities of
scientists (Latour 1983, 141; emphasis added).

Retrospective evaluations of the move into the laboratory echo this vocabu-
lary, emphasizing the relationship between the new knowledges and epis-
temologies of STS, the physical presence of the observer in the lab, and
the visible action of scientists. Lab studies offered:

. . . a detailed description of the gestures and actions observed in scientific

work without focusing on intentionality or concepts, without putting forward
any (social) explanation of the development of the sciences . . . . By focusing
on . . . the mundane acts that make scientific activity, [lab ethnographers] lib-
erate their gaze, enabling an unexpected new perspective on a world that
appeared to be quite familiar (Pestre 2004, 357; emphasis added).
Ethnography furnished the optics for viewing the process of knowledge
production as ‘‘constructive’’ rather than descriptive (Knorr Cetina 2001,
141; emphasis added).

Within the texts of specific laboratory ethnographies there is a similar

emphasis on the link between seeing and knowing. As Mody notes, con-
temporary science studies is deeply colored by a way of ‘‘speaking in
epistemology’’ that privileges ‘‘picturing knowledge’’ (2005, 175). STS
here partakes of generic modernist traditions which privilege the visual
over the other senses, especially oral/aural traditions. Modernity was in
large part about the settlement of a scopic regime (Jay 1992) or hege-
mony of vision (Levin 1993), especially in the discourses of formal phi-
losophy and science itself. Cartesian philosophy was particularly
Garforth 269

important in imagining mental representations as constituting the

‘‘mind’s eye’’ and the mind as the ‘‘mirror of nature’’ (Jencks 1995;
Rorty 1979). Visual metaphors for abstract thought, for example tropes
of clarity, enlightenment, and perspective, are particularly common
(Haraway 1997; Urry 2000), and Diken (1998) argues that they are associ-
ated especially with theoretical thinking. Feminist philosophers have com-
mented extensively on the dominance of ‘‘spectator epistemologies’’ and
visual models of knowledge in masculinist and positivist traditions (Bordo
1999; Braidotti 1991; Code 2006; Fox Keller and Grontkowski 2002), often
in contrast to more ‘‘ecological’’ (Code 2006), empathetic, or embodied
ways of knowing (Jaggar 1989). Critiques of modernity’s optical meta-
phors have emphasized their invocation of detachment, distance, and exter-
iority, such that modern objectivity becomes associated with domination
and mastery, as in Foucault’s model of the panopticon and feminist cri-
tiques of the masculine gaze.
The kinds of seeing and knowing that are valued in the lab ethnogra-
phy are not, straightforwardly at least, the distance and detachment asso-
ciated with this objective gaze. As Mody (2005) suggests, laboratory
studies have been particularly interested in (natural) scientists’ own
observational practices (see, for example, Galison 1997; Lynch 1985;
Lynch and Woolgar 1990). STS observers have represented themselves
watching as scientists look closely at objects, traces, images, and inscrip-
tions. The rhetorical emphasis is on seeing close up, in context, and in the
middle of the action. In this sense, the lab study owes much to the anthro-
pological methods and discourses that were self-consciously taken as pre-
cursors (and later rejected; see Hess 2001) by Latour and Woolgar
(1986). Anthropology has been strongly associated with colonialism and
the capacity of the rationalizing European gaze to dominate non-Western
cultures. However, ethnography is also associated with the invention of
participant observation methods and an intimate and situated kind of see-
ing and knowing (Clifford 1983). Lab studies inherit the association in
twentieth century anthropology between insight and access to the inner
workings of cultures. Their ethnographic accounts make strong claims
based on the epistemic importance of firsthand witnessing of practices
and the capacity of the analyst to reveal them to outsiders through the
text (Geertz 1988). In the moment of revelation, distancing and decontex-
tualization are reintroduced in order to produce a new picture, by playing
the demystifying stranger to scientific cultures (Hess 2001). The charac-
teristic rhetoric of the lab study, then, links seeing to (real) understanding,
and showing to making (a new kind of) (textual) sense.
270 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

KNOWING in the Laboratory: The Limits of the

Ethnographic Gaze
I turn now from these highly persuasive accounts of the epistemological
value of observation in the laboratory in STS to my own attempts to conduct
ethnographically inspired observation studies with bioscience and social
science researchers. These formed part of the qualitative data generation
of the KNOWING project (Note 1). My analysis draws on fieldnotes taken
during approximately 6 months of observation conducted for 2 or 3 days
every week in two bioscience labs, and during occasioned observation with
individual social science researchers over the same period. The discussion
below is divided into two parts to address the distinctive ways in which
dynamics of seeing and not seeing were experienced in bioscience labora-
tories compared to the social sciences, relating to contrasts in spatial setting,
institutional organization, and epistemic cultures in the two disciplines. In
both cases, I begin with when, where, and how observational access to par-
ticipants’ knowledge work was difficult. In that sense, this article is an
attempt to go back to the ‘‘mess’’ (Law 2004) and disorder of the project’s
method. It stages a strategic return to my own knowledge-in-the-making in
order to make a new and partial ordering, one that emphasizes ambiguities
around the nature of research sites and ambivalences that emerged in rela-
tion to the visibility of epistemic practices on the part of the participants and
in the practices of reflexive ethnography.
For that reason, much of the discussion below concerns non-data, open
ends, and (literal and metaphorical) closed doors, and the data presented is
somewhat limited in comparison to a conventional ethnographic study. My
aim is to use a section of the KNOWING data strategically in order to develop
a methodological and epistemological argument about the value of knowing
and seeing in laboratory studies. Specifically, I attempt to turn what might be
regarded as practical problems in conducting observational research into crit-
ical reflections on the nature of observation per se. Undoubtedly, the prob-
lems I discuss could be attributed to issues in the research design (a more
actively participatory and immersive ethnographic role would have produced
a rather different story), and/or the effectiveness with which I performed in
the field as an ethnographer. Nonetheless, I treat these problems reflexively
as resources rather than obstacles to generating meaningful data, in order to
consider how being observed—and doing observing—was negotiated and
sometimes resisted in the field. This non/data draws attention to aspects of
knowledge work which were seen as private and solitary, and which either
were or were made invisible to the observing gaze.
Garforth 271

(Not) Seeing in the Laboratory: Being Boring and

Being Intrusive
We found the two laboratories in our study relatively easy to access. Like
Knorr Cetina (1999), we noted the openness of teams of scientists to socio-
logical study. Laboratories are public, bounded spaces that bring researchers,
materials, and machines together in visible routines (Beaulieu 2010, 456).
They also have a degree of institutional stability and local organizational and
interpersonal coherence. In both labs, initial negotiations with the group at
their lab meetings were shaped by a combination of hierarchy and collegial-
ity. The lab leader/professor acted as a gatekeeper, but the decision to partic-
ipate was, formally at least, made by the groups as a whole. Although the
physical space of the laboratory and its shared working areas meant that in
principle a range of activities were open to observation, there was little dis-
cussion of what it might mean in practice. In the smaller of the two labs, this
was largely resolved by the group itself. Here researchers frequently worked
intensively together on time-critical tasks, there were plenty of collective tea
breaks and informal chat, and a researcher and a technician acted informally
as gatekeepers. However, in the larger of the two laboratories researchers
tended to work separately on parallel tasks. Each had a dedicated space at the
bench and in the write-up area. Here there was no informal gatekeeper.
In the larger lab, then, I spent a good deal of time shadowing, watching,
and talking to researchers separately, and it was here that some dynamics of
in/visibility became apparent. The first related to researchers expressing
self-consciousness, and sometimes even acute discomfort, with being
observed, especially when carrying out routine experimental preparation
work which they often described as boring, as in the following examples
taken from observational fieldnotes:
I ask whether I can spend some time with one of the postdocs on Monday. She
agrees, but says Monday will be ‘‘really boring.’’ She’s starting a new set of
experiments—‘‘just following a long list of instructions—it won’t be interest-
ing for you.’’
D. Is calculating a range of solution strengths; apologizes that this will be
‘‘boring’’ for me.

A second dynamic concerned the sense that my observation, especially in

one-to-one settings, was intrusive. One female postdoc explained that
‘‘I don’t like the idea of being observed [ . . . ] what do you need me to
do?’’ Another researcher asked to take a break from a session in which
he demonstrated his work to me at the bench, finding it ‘‘a bit intense.’’
272 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

On another occasion, a postdoc withdrew from the observation because she

unexpectedly found that she needed to change tack and plan a new set of
experiments. She asked for some time to think alone about the new tasks.
As we discussed this, another researcher added that she had planned her day
so that my observation would not coincide with her undertaking some
experimental calculations which she really needed to concentrate on.
A third dynamic of invisibility concerned researchers’ comments on the
activities in the laboratory that I had not seen by not being physically
present every day, including the large amounts of time they spent ‘‘on com-
puters, planning and modeling genetic and molecular experiments.’’
It will be evident from the researchers’ responses to me that the ethno-
graphic self I performed in the labs was a negotiated and sometimes rather
tentative one. It did not conform to Latour’s rules of method for following
scientists and engineers through society (1987). However, these negotia-
tions had the value of bringing to light what researchers claimed and dis-
claimed in settings where observation was explicitly on the agenda. I
focus on the first two dynamics of visibility outlined above. One reading
of the appeal to work being routine or boring is that these tactics seek to
undercut the very visibility of certain kinds of action—to make them less
noticeable and disclaim their importance. I took the researchers to be claim-
ing that the fact that something is visible does not mean that it matters. In
my first meeting with this lab group, researchers pointed out that what I saw
them doing all day (preparing plates, measuring plant growth) might not tell
me much about their work.
Of course, the boring work, the routines, the manipulation of machines,
materials, and texts is often precisely what the STS researcher wants to see,
in contrast to the exciting moments that scientists prefer to foreground, and
their discursive constructions of knowledge-making in terms of intellec-
tual/analytical projects. Lab studies have been about bringing to light the
detail of the ordinary and banishing into the shadows science’s closed and
settled self-representations, its emphasis on ideas, discoveries, and break-
throughs. But the researchers here were also claiming time away from
scrutiny—and, apparently paradoxically, they were often doing so in the
name of work that was the least physically observable, work that they
described as ‘‘thinking,’’ or ‘‘analyzing,’’ or ‘‘planning.’’ They described
this work in terms that stressed its immersive, still, and essentially
solitary nature: ‘‘I really need time just quietly to go over these notes’’;
‘‘I can’t really show you how the analysis works. Well, I can, but
showing it wouldn’t be the same as doing it.’’ In the following section,
I outline how the physical and epistemic organization of work in the
Garforth 273

social sciences means that time and space for solitary and immersive
work does not need to be claimed individually in the same way.

(Not) Seeing in the Social Sciences: The Ambiguities of the Office

In contrast to the laboratories, access to field sites in the social sciences was
difficult. Senior staff seemed to dissociate themselves from hierarchical
positions—heads of department refused to act as gatekeepers or representa-
tives for colleagues, for example. But there was also less evident collegial-
ity; the responses of department heads cut off or failed to imagine the
possibility of a collective discussion. We also approached applied social
science contract researchers, who in contrast to department teaching-and-
research staff routinely worked on collaborative projects. Here team identi-
ties and relationships were explicitly claimed and valued, but also seemed to
function in protective and inward-looking ways. Teams declined to partici-
pate in the project, giving reasons that recalled some of the problems of intru-
siveness outlined above; they told us that observation of their fieldwork
would compromise relationships with their research participants, and
expressed concerns that in their office spaces it would be disruptive and
time-consuming. It seemed clear that the researchers’ knowledge of qualita-
tive methods in the social sciences meant a high awareness of the practical-
ities of observation research; we were perhaps ‘‘too close to be welcomed’’
(Wöhrer 2008).
Some individual researchers agreed to participate in the project, but the
question of what was to be observed, and where, had to be continually rene-
gotiated. Observation was occasioned rather than ongoing, consisting in an
opportunistic mix of lectures, tutorials, administrative meetings, research
seminars, and a few occasions when research teams came together to dis-
cuss and present findings. I also spent time in staff offices and at my own
desk space in the department. Without the methodological convenience
of the lab, knowledge practices were rarely on show but rather retreated into
solitary spaces or coalesced fleetingly in meetings. Invisibility was the
default, both physically and in terms of the difficulty of negotiating interac-
tional ‘‘co-presence’’ (Beaulieu 2010). Dynamics of visibility had less to do
with researchers disclaiming the significance of observable work or claim-
ing time away from observation, and instead concerned negotiating what
could be made visible given the largely solitary character of much work
in the social sciences, which Beaulieu describes as ‘‘intimate,’’ built around
‘‘solitary’’—although by no means asocial—practices (Beaulieu 2010,
456). Epistemic work tended to be individual and discontinuous, and hence
274 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

concealed and dispersed. My experiences support Beaulieu’s observation

that there is no self-evident spatial ‘‘field’’ for studies of knowledge produc-
tion in the humanities and social sciences. Time becomes more important
than space, and negotiated ‘‘co-presence’’ and ‘‘active field-making’’
supplants unreflexive ‘‘co-location’’ (2010, 463).
In the absence of collective workspaces, the office in particular became
an insistent focus for uncertainties around observation. It was a site of
ambivalence rather than revelation, simultaneously promising and frustrat-
ing the possibility of seeing social science knowledge in action. I experi-
enced my presence there as intrusive and disruptive, and often found
myself resisting the role of observer in one-to-one settings, much as the
bioscientists on occasion withdrew from my observation in the labs. The
research participants made similar disclaimers to the biologists when
discussing my observation: ‘‘[i]t’s just me sitting in the office in front of the
computer [ . . . ] what do you want to see?’’ However, social scientists were
also ambivalent about their use of the office in ways that did not seem to be
shared by the bioscientists’ relationships with their lab spaces. It was seen
often as a space to withdraw into, a place of epistemic work away from
other demands (teaching, meetings—and the gaze of the interested obser-
ver) but also as a space of availability (to students and colleagues) which
must be withdrawn from. Social scientists talked in terms that recall
Bishop’s idea of ‘‘self-exile from the office’’ (1999, 116), explaining that
‘‘sometimes I have to get out of the office to get any work done.’’2
Latour counsels that following scientists at work need not stop at the
office door, or because ‘‘they are handling paper and pencil instead of work-
ing in laboratories or travelling through the world’’ (1987, 235). While
nothing much may seem to be happening, close scrutiny will show that ana-
lytical (‘‘thinking’’) work is as practical and concrete as manipulating a gel
plate or an HPLC machine. Latour laments the paucity of studies of ‘‘form-
alism’’ or theoretical thinking, insisting that social studies of science must
observe at firsthand what goes on in the centers of calculation. The spaces
and the work of theory and thinking are represented as the last bastions of
science practice, the ‘‘Holy of Holies’’ that ‘‘we must penetrate’’ (1987,
245). A courageous, combative ethnographer-figure appears here, ready
to follow the practical scientist-at-work into the office and at the desk. This
figure is very different from the ethnographic self I performed in the field.
However, being attentive to the social mores and affective economies that
shape what is and what is not felt to be appropriate to observe (and partici-
pating as a coproducer of those distinctions) generated its own data. Nego-
tiations over privacy and visibility were part of the field, a resource for both
Garforth 275

participants and observer. In both disciplines, a good deal of knowledge

activity was either physically invisible or made so as a result of interactional
negotiations over copresence and withdrawal during the observation.

Beyond Being There: Making In/Visibilities Matter

The analysis of field data (and non-data) above suggests that visibility is
practiced and coproduced as part of the relational dynamics of the social
science field. These dynamics can be brought to light by attending explicitly
to research participants’ responses to the observer’s gaze. STS accounts of
the construction of facts have made much of how the materials and
machines that are part of the laboratory assemblage exert their own agen-
cies, pushing back against the attempts of the scientist to know them. How-
ever, most lab studies have had little to say about how human objects object
to and in the process of research, when subjects resist not the content of
claims being made, but push back against the demands made by the inves-
tigation itself. For example in Laboratory Life, when the book’s ‘‘[a]nthro-
pologist visits the laboratory,’’ he reflects on the scientists’ skepticism
toward his emergent analytical framework (treating the laboratory as an
inscription factory), but not on how scientists as embodied subjects
responded to being involved in the observation study. The ethnographer
is depersonalized, framed as a ‘‘fictional’’ character in order to ‘‘draw atten-
tion to the process whereby we engaged in constructing an account’’ (Latour
and Woolgar 1986, 88, n1)—but arguably removing the real body of the
observer from the lab setting in the process.
I would argue, then, that the lab study genre has tended to rely on the
rhetorical authority of witnessing and revelation, rather than exploring the
discursively and materially situated gaze and ‘‘partial vision’’ (Haraway
1991, 1997) of the ethnographer as part of a reflexive methodology. Lab
studies have tended to treat being there as a straightforward outcome of
‘‘penetrat[ing] these black boxes,’’ the scientific laboratories (Latour
1983, 141). But being there, as Geertz reminds us (1988), is a textual con-
struction, not a simple matter of fact. Appeals to being there are no guaran-
tee of seeing there, and indeed may gloss the interactional and epistemic
dynamics of doing observation. Physical presence is ‘‘not equivalent to
availability for interaction’’ (Beaulieu 2010, 454; cites Goffman 1971).
Rather than ‘‘co-location,’’ Beaulieu argues, we should think about ethno-
graphic work in terms of the ‘‘co-presence’’ that is actively accomplished
by participants and researchers. This approach unsettles the ‘‘unidirectional
and ocularcentric connotations of witnessing,’’ and asks STS researchers to
276 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

build ethnographic authority not on ‘‘being there’’ but on dynamic and

negotiated processes of ‘‘contiguity’’—being near and being with (Beaulieu
2010, 454). My study points to some of the tensions and difficulties
involved in producing a workable contiguity and suggests that reflecting
on its construction may be valuable. In doing so, I have drawn attention
to the sometimes awkward presence of my embodied ethnographic self,
in contrast to the texts of the lab ethnographies mentioned above.
Moreover, the penetration and ‘‘being there’’ so valued in STS as a
means of opening up the intimate life of science can also be read as an
incursion into private spaces. Fieldwork inevitably ‘‘represents an intrusion
and intervention into a system of relationships’’ (Stacey 1988, 23) and
researchers—including the social science observer—have a strongly felt
sense of what is and is not appropriate to observe. In some situations, as I
have shown, privacy and invisibility will be insisted on, through disclaim-
ing the value of practical tasks, claiming time away from observation, or
because the spatial and social organization of epistemic spaces militate
against seeing in situ. Star and Strauss (1999) have analyzed the difficulties
associated with observing solitary aspects of work processes. Attempts to
go ‘‘backstage,’’ in the language of their interactionist sociology, ‘‘risk vio-
lating peoples’ autonomy, or simply getting no useful information about
how the work is really done’’ (Star and Strauss 1999, 22). Backstage can
be a space for making mistakes, for processes of trial and error which are
crucial to the development of competence but need not be submitted to the
public gaze. As such, invisibility is closely linked to autonomy and discre-
tion in work processes. Making practices amenable to scrutiny can make
them count (acknowledged and valued) but also draws them into logics
of accountability, either in relation to a specific observer or a generalized
observing—and auditing—eye (Star and Strauss 1999, 9-10).
These are precisely the tensions that have been critically analyzed in
relation to contemporary audit cultures in academic research (Shore and
Wright 2000; Shore 2008). Although much of research audit concerns
texts—documenting activity and counting outputs—it proceeds, as
Strathern has argued, according to logics and technologies of ‘‘making the
invisible visible’’ (2000, 309). Transparency and openness to scrutiny offer
accountability and enhanced understandings of work processes, but risk
becoming a ‘‘tyranny’’ where visibility is enacted as an instrument of con-
trol or technique of (self-)regulation (Strathern 2000, 309). These tyrannical
dimensions of visibilizing practice clearly have no part to play in the agen-
das of STS studies of epistemic cultures. However, the visibilizing logics of
STS epistemologies share some assumptions with contemporary modes of
Garforth 277

research assessment. Both downplay the value of trust and subjective

investments in embodied expertise and the significance of thinking and
reflection in knowledge production (Strathern 2000), those aspects which
are invisible and internal.

Rethinking Thinking
I have indicated throughout this article that where invisibility matters most
in the lab ethnography is in relation to thinking. Seen conventionally as
located in individual minds, thinking is literally invisible. It was also the
type of work that participants in my study protected from observation, and
in relation to which observation risked disrupting or fundamentally chang-
ing the activity, as in Star and Strauss’s analysis. I have indicated above that
invisibility, therefore, poses a significant and potentially generative metho-
dological challenge to science studies. However, if individual cognitive
work is invisible in STS studies of knowledge-making, it is not solely for
methodological reasons. A complex set of epistemological and ontological
moves have explicitly ruled out the cognitive in studies of science. The turn
to practice in science studies was part of a theoretical project insisting that
knowledge production is cultural and material through and through, and that
there is no special form of cognition in science. These arguments con-
structed a strict binary between the social and the cognitive (Giere and Mof-
fatt 2003), most powerfully articulated in Latour and Woolgar’s notorious
10-year moratorium on cognitive explanations of scientific knowledge
(1986, 280).
Latour insists (after Heidegger) that ‘‘thinking [is] craftwork,’’ an active
part of working with the materials to hand, not abstract analogical reason
(1986, 174; Chap. 6, 168-74; see also 1987, 134-7). His critique focuses par-
ticularly on the trope of ‘‘having an idea’’ which performs a rhetorical
‘‘summary’’ concealing the ‘‘complicated material situation’’ (1986, 170)
and the ‘‘crowds of actors’’ involved in the constitution of knowledge
(Latour 1987, 135). On this reading, cognitive work can be ‘‘penetrated’’
like the labs themselves and demystified to reveal yet more practices and
inscriptions (Latour 1987, 245). Individual, solitary thought is a suspicious
trope in STS: it is not directly visible, it leaves no traces, and worst of all it
stands as an alibi for those who wish to maintain some special or elite qual-
ity of science. It is against these ‘‘so-called ‘thought processes’’’ (Latour
and Woolgar 1986, 151) that Latour most intensively deploys rhetorics of
witnessing in his own writing (especially Latour and Woolgar 1986, 151-
3, 171-3), relentlessly marking up the contrast between insights generated
278 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

through being there at the scene of scientific action, and idealized

epistemologies of knowledge as a property of individual minds. In related
work in the history of science, Shapin draws attention to how public
discourses of the ‘‘mind in its own [private] place’’ were critical to ensuring
that scientific knowledge was valued and legitimated as universal and
decontextual (1991, 210). For Shapin, ‘‘backstage’’ is about the arts of con-
cealment, not the conditions of epistemic autonomy and integrity, and the
pose of solitary thought works ultimately to preserve an aura of scientific
certainty and authority uncontaminated by social influences.
The importance of these robust contestations of solitary cognition in STS
cannot be underestimated. But recognizing the significance of thinking in
epistemic work does not necessitate an unreflexive veneration of the
individual mind, or reject the insights of the practice turn. Recent work
on cognition in science studies has convincingly positioned thinking as
itself a practice that can be visibilized in various ways. Gooding (2006)
analyses how diagrams and models are materially part of the cognitive pro-
cess rather than simply its representation. Nerssesian (2005) explores an
environmental approach to cognition that frames thinking as constitutively
embedded in rich material, social, and cultural contexts. Related work on
distributed cognition (for an overview of its relationship with STS, see
Giere and Moffatt 2003) and virtual networks (Beaulieu 2010) disrupts the
association between cognition and the individual mind, tracing epistemic
processes through multiple, dynamic, and partial sites and connections.
Combining Latourian insights into the production of facts with an interest
in cognition in the social sciences, Konopásek (2008) gives an intriguing
account of the use of software for qualitative data analysis might visibilize
thinking in the social sciences.
These approaches, however, remain largely committed to ‘‘making
thinking visible’’ (Konopásek 2008). Methodological strategies include lab
(and office) ethnographies focused on instruments, objects, and diagrams,
and the historical study of textual and visual objects produced in laboratory
settings. These studies of cognition-as-practice do not aim to understand the
meanings of private thinking work for individual researchers, such as those
that emerged in my study. Nor do they take account of the cultures of audit
and research assessment which saturate contemporary academic institu-
tions. With both these factors in mind, my aim is to consider the value for
STS of recognizing epistemic work that is not directly visible to the obser-
ver, that resists being seen, and that perhaps should not be witnessed by the
laboratory or office ethnographer. The problem in both the STS lab ethno-
graphy and recent work on cognition is not the understanding of science as
Garforth 279

practice per se but the strong association between practice and visible
action. This tends to produce a narrow vision in which knowledge-
making is seen exclusively as activity, doing, and movement on one hand,
or in terms of objects, visual representations, and instruments on the other.
In privileging social explanations of science, the ‘‘social’’ has been framed
in terms of public and collective settings, such as the laboratory. Individual
and solitary work, and work in private spaces such as the office, has offered
neither methodological convenience nor epistemological value.
I have focused on those spaces and times in epistemic life and the ethno-
graphic field when busy, active practice seems to be absent, and when the
methodological challenge of understanding solitary, static work is most
acute. I have noted above some affinities between the logics of visibiliza-
tion in ethnographic lab studies and those currently at work in research
audit. I want to suggest that a similar parallel seems to obtain between the
emphasis on visible action that has emerged from the lab study tradition and
the dominant language of research activity in the UK’s Research Assess-
ment Exercise.3 In the language of the RAE to be research active is to be
productive, innovative, and fundable. Activity is made visible to the audit-
ing eye through outputs and traceable practices, including participation in
research projects, publications, being named on grants, supervising research
students, and other ‘‘markers of esteem’’ that literally and metaphorically
raise individual profiles. To be research inactive, by implication, is to be
invisible and in deficit according to current audit logics.
The extent to which the RAE’s discourses of research activity have been
thoroughly translated into institutional cultures and epistemic subjectivities
is illustrated in a further example of non/data on invisibility taken from the
KNOWING observation study. A potential social science participant ruled
himself out of being involved, explaining that having recently moved from
a short-term research contract to a teaching-only post as he built his aca-
demic career he could not, as he put it in an e-mail, describe himself as
‘‘research active.’’ We borrowed the terms of STS to set up our study—
knowledge production, observing epistemic cultures in action—and in this
instance called forth a response in terms of logics of assessment. The other
ways in which research ‘‘inactive’’ academics might contribute to science,
through teaching, administration, collegial, and community work—not to
mention the old-fashioned idea of scholarship—are left out of the account,
along with the time-consuming processes of reflexive, immersive thinking
that many claim make the visible work of epistemic production possible
(Pels 2003; Ylijoki and Mäntyla 2003). In this respect, it is worth acknowl-
edging that the participants in my study who seemed most likely to enact
280 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

discomfort with the process of observation were postdoctoral researchers in

the labs and early-career social scientists. For these groups, the relationship
between practical work in the laboratory/office and outputs in terms of pub-
lication was difficult; this was frequently discussed in the observation study
and interviews. Most were at a stage where they needed to be seen to be
research active or, as some put it, ‘‘RAE-able,’’ in order to continue work-
ing in academic science or develop their careers. Early career social scien-
tists reflected in interviews about the lack of time to think in this situation.
Many felt that the rush to output was ‘‘too intense . . . far too fast,’’ (inter-
view, social science lecturer), especially in relation to commissioned and
contract research. For them, research activity/visibility was constructed in
opposition to slower and more immersive analytical and thinking practices
(see also Author 2010).
The examples from my study above seem to indicate that the process of
social science observation drew forth concerns from researchers relating to
research assessment and visible activity. What counts in the assessment of
science is research understood exclusively as active doing. Modes of know-
ing that foreground embodied expertise and interaction with no object/
ifiable outcome—outputs in the language of research assessment; knowl-
edge claims or ‘‘facts’’ in the language of Latourian STS—are difficult to
defend or even to articulate. They are literally invisible and discursively
absent. The black-boxing of cognition in recent STS does not necessarily
contribute to the audit logics of contemporary research cultures. But nor
does it offer many resources for examining and contesting the logic of
research activity that frames assessment policies in the contemporary
academy. Attempts to bring cognitive explanations back into science
studies have observed that Latour and Woolgar’s 10-year moratorium on
‘‘cognitive explanations’’ of science (1986, 247) has long passed. I add to
these arguments some empirical testimony that thinking matters to knowl-
edge producers in an audit context, and suggest therefore that there are good
strategic reasons for rethinking the importance of thinking in STS.

Conclusion
In one sense, laboratory studies, especially Latour’s early work, have
always been about the invisible in science. They have been interested in
what was previously unseen by outsiders, cloistered in the semi-private
spaces of the laboratory and cloaked in the mystique of science as exotic,
special, and different. They deployed an analytical framework that treats
scientific practice as mundane, the unnoticeable backdrop against which
Garforth 281

discoveries take shape (Latour and Woolgar 1986). They threw a strong
light on the daily actions in epistemic networks that had previously been
in the shadows. Bringing this vision of how science works into the light
is associated with the strong rhetorics of witnessing and revelation in the
texts of lab ethnographies. In the process, other aspects of knowledge work
drop out of the account. In the ‘‘(always) heterogeneous’’ world of work,
Star and Strauss remind us, there are multiple perspectives and points of
view from which things can be seen. Vision is always practiced and located:
‘‘illuminating one corner may throw another into darkness’’ (1999 23, 25;
see also Strathern 2000). The emphasis on being there to observe the action
in constructionist STS has led, on my analysis, to a rhetorical fetishization
of what is literally visible in the laboratory, and to a discourse of visual epis-
temologies that emphasizes witnessing without acknowledging partial
vision. It has been my aim to disrupt the confident epistemologies of vision
that have shaped so much of the laboratory ethnography tradition in STS by
recognizing the messiness and partiality of observational methods. Witnes-
sing scientific work is thus seen as the outcome of methodological, episte-
mological, and textual practices that may hold together only contingently.
I have argued that epistemic subjects treat key aspects of knowledge-in-
the-making as literally invisible, and that they also make parts of their
knowledge work invisible to the observer, both through stable spatial and
cultural arrangements and through occasioned negotiations. I have outlined
how the issue of invisibility becomes particularly acute when moving into
epistemic places beyond the field sites of the natural sciences. But this move
also draws attention to what might be going on in other epistemic spaces in
the laboratory itself. This method of generating insights by moving between
different knowledge production cultures owes much to Knorr Cetina’s
‘‘comparative optics’’ (1999, 4). However, I have tried to problematize the
metaphors of seeing-as-knowing that permeate the practice turn in STS, and
adopt instead a strategy related to Haraway’s notion of diffraction (1997)
whereby different kinds of seeing are not simply perspectival but work
oppositionally to reconfigure objects and concerns. I have also drawn atten-
tion to the importance of invisible practices in science. I suggest that there is
a need to reconsider the dissolution of thinking into material and busy
action that has been a hallmark of STS traditions. Strategically, this may
also be a matter of protecting from scrutiny science work that may not—
or should not—be visibilized through outputs and research activity. The
observational gaze of the STS researcher wishes to found a new kind of
account of science, while the audit gaze of research assessment wishes to
count and hold accountable. But in both cases the link between visibility
282 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(2)

and accounting risks reducing the richness of knowledge work to what can be
seen. Identifying other epistemic spaces in science studies, then, includes leav-
ing room for the invisible without necessarily seeking to bring it into the light.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article:
The empirical research that informs this paper was conducted as part of the proj-
ect KNOWING (Knowledge, Institutions and Gender: An East-West Comparative
Study) and funded under the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme,
Specific Targeted Research Project No SAS-CT-2005-017617.

Notes
1. KNOWING (Knowledge, Institutions and Gender: An East-West Comparative
Study) was funded under the European Commission’s (EC) 6th Framework
Programme and conducted between 2005 and 2008. Further information can
be found at http://knowing.soc.cas.cz. The views expressed in this article are
those of the writer and do not reflect the position or opinion of the EC.
2. Bioscience researchers also did some of their analytical and writing work in
offices or at home. The bioscience professors were rarely involved in everyday
observation as they no longer did much bench work and were mainly in their pri-
vate offices, in meetings, or teaching, much like the social science lecturing staff.
I have emphasized the different dynamics of visibility in the two disciplines, but
of course there is also much in common.
3. Referred to hereafter as ‘‘RAE.’’ To be replaced in its next iteration by the Research
Excellence Framework (REF). See http://www.hefce.ac.uk/research/ref/.

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Bio
Lisa Garforth is a lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University. She has published
on gender, academic organisations and epistemic practices, and on women and sci-
ence policies. Her other research interests are in environmental knowledges, in par-
ticular the imagination of alternative futures with nature.