Ethics, politics and embodied imagination in crafting scientific knowledge

Bell, Emma and Willmott, Hugh (2020). Ethics, politics and embodied imagination in crafting scientific knowledge. Human Relations, 73(10) pp. 1366–1387.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726719876687

Abstract

This paper explores ‘research-as-craft’ as a sensitising concept for disclosing the presence of ethics and politics, as well as embodiment and imagination, in the doing and representation of scientific activity. Routinely unnoticed, marginalized or suppressed in methodology sections of articles and methodology textbooks, research-as-craft gestures towards messy, tacit, uncertain, yet rarely thematized, practices that are central to getting science done. To acknowledge and address the significance of research-as-craft in knowledge production, we show how it relates to three forms of reflexivity – constitutive, epistemic and disruptive. Through this we demonstrate the craftiness that is required when struggling with the indeterminacy that is endemic to the production and communication of scientific knowledge. By showing how empirical situations require imaginative interpretation by embodied researchers, we argue that our conception of research-as-craft facilitates appreciation of scientific inquiry as an indexical activity that involves the crafted object and the researcher in an ethico-political process of co-constituting knowledge.

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