Caring for Methods: ‘Care-Ful Method Practice’ through Methodography

Abstract

Methods matter. We argue for methodography as a genre of care-ful interrogation of method practice. We systematically read three STS texts concerned with ethnographic methods published during the past decade and (meta)analyse how these texts account for their ethnographic encounters and these encounters’ frictions. Methodographic analysis contributes to ‘care-ful research’ in STS by analysing how, when and towards whom the cases textually perform care. With methodical sensibilities towards ‘care-ful method practice’ we suggest to diversify the conversation about ‘care’ that has been predominantly attended to as an empiric and/or theory-generating analytic notion in care studies in STS. We argue that methodography provides a flexible, infrastructure-building, analytical tool with the potential of adding another, method-focused layer of care.

With this chapter’s meta-methodographic analysis, we contribute to a better understanding about how STS researchers’ texts achieve care through and for methods, for research questions and agendas, as well as for their authors as researchers and their collaborators. We hope to bring empirical attention to the infrastructures that STS researchers mobilise to gather, process and analyse data or materials, and their ecologies of more or less careful practices. At the same time, we theorise what kinds of effects these practices enact, what the empirical is doing in these ecologies and speculate how methodographic reflections can ground more or differently careful and caring encounters with our collaborators in future.