Laboratory Ethnography
Laboratory ethnography is the anthropological study of scientists at work, observing how scientific facts are constructed through the mundane practices of the laboratory rather than discovered ready-made in nature. Pioneered by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's Laboratory Life and Karin Knorr-Cetina's The Manufacture of Knowledge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it brought the gaze of the field anthropologist into the lab as if studying an exotic tribe. The method follows benchwork, inscription devices, and the conversational and material labour through which claims are stripped of their qualifications until they harden into facts. It treats knowledge as manufactured, local, and contingent, and renders that manufacture visible through immersive observation and thick description.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1986). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. · ISBN 9780691028323
- Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981). The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Pergamon Press. · ISBN 9780080257778
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.