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Author
Name Verran, Helen
Research field Social Science
Career stage professor
Home university/institution Charles Darwin University
Department/Research unit at home university/institution -
Chair/Working group at home institution -

International activity
Country Germany
Location Bochum
University Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB)
Fund Research School VIP
Type of activity research stay
Period starts 01-01-2018
ends 31-12-2020
Keywords -
Report Project

Knowing Collectives. Empirical Studies of Knowledge Making in Scientific and Technological Cultures

The idea of an empirical epistemology still comes as a shock to some scholars, yet it has been a core practice in science and technology studies (STS) for nearly fifty years now. Empirical focus on epistemic practices of anthropological knowledge is the broad scholarly concern that Helen Verran, of Charles Darwin University in northern Australia, shares with the group of scholars who make up CAST, the Centre for Anthropological Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Cultures, in the Social Science Faculty. Helen Verran is well known to those who make up CAST having worked with graduate students in this unit on four previous visits. Across 2018 and 2019 four further such visits are planned. Each visit to RUB is planned as a ten-day stay during which engagement with graduate students and junior faculty will be the primary focus. One-on-one work with doctoral students, reading group activities, and participation in a forum focusing on method and methodological issues in ethnography are planned. Professor Verran will also contribute in the CAST Colloquium. The first visit is planned in May-June 2018 with subsequent visits occurring at regular intervals across the 2018-19 academic year carrying on into the start of the next.

4th - 15th June 2018

Due to the funding of the RUB Research School, the Centre for Anthropological Knowledge in Scientific and Technological Cultures (CAST) could welcome the epistemologist and ethnographer Prof Helen Verran from Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, from the 4th – 15th June 2018. She has engaged joyfully and thoroughly in a variety of activities and in individual projects.

Being a long-time supporter of CAST, Helen Verran contributed in many ways in the CAST’s research culture on empirical epistemology. This year, she gave a talk at the CAST Colloquium on the 14th June 2018 where she spoke about ‘Stories of Numbers and Analyzing Number’s Social Life’. Helen Verran argues numbers have a social life and emerge through collective epistemic practices that can be analysed empirically. Her talk attracted not only students and researchers of CAST and of the chair of Cultural Psychology and Anthropology of Knowledge at RUB, but also other researchers, such as of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Similarly successful, but in a different way, were the meetings with the graduate students. While discussing the individual research projects the benefit of spending time with each other allowed the students to discuss the collection and interpretation of data in debth. The ongoing talks about different ways of doing ethnographic research allowed the students and Helen Verran to engage collaboratively in ethnographic research culture and to relate their work to currently undertaken international research projects. Helen Verran also participated in the RUSTS Colloquium for Master- and PhD students and attended two classes of master students. Having shaped the academic discipline of Science and Technology Studies for decades, Helen Verran’s stories of how certain ideas became important or less important made not only teachings entertaining, but also started to create an archive of the history of this discipline designed for RUB students. The videos she recorded for the classes will be a rich resource for classes in later semesters and years. Finally, Helen Verran also engaged in the planning and preparation of future research cooperation. As a result, by an emerging scholar or RUB will co-write a paper with Helen Verran.

Having Helen Verran as a VIP Fellow has been a highly appreciated opportunity for our students to value and reflect on how their approach to research are specific, historically emergent and how they can be expanded and linked to international research projects. We look forwar d to having Helen Verran here again in November 2018 and to continue working on PhD projects and on collaborations for the present and the future.
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