Speaker
Ilil Naveh-Benjamin (Cornell University, Science and Technology Studies)
Title
Red Marbles and Electric Shock Machines: Foucault and the Ethnography of Psychology
Abstract
Numerous historical and philosophical accounts of experimental psychology have invoked Foucault to understand psychology’s role in the governance of individuals (e.g., Nikolas Rose, Ian Hacking, Stephen Ward, Ellen Herman, Jill Morawski, and others). Focusing on psychology’s language of variables and methods of quantification, such accounts have asked how psypower legitimizes and normalizes a particular vision of the calculable individual in modern liberal democracies.
In this talk, I suggest that a Foucault-nourished critical space, while offering important insights regarding psychology’s macro social impact, presents unique challenges to the microscopic interests of ethnography. Namely, assuming ethnographers might care about how psychologists make
knowledge – that is, why they choose the methods they do and how they interpret their data – then what often gets left out of the Foucauldian story is the reality of psychology as a knowledge-making endeavour, whatever its power effects might be. Some Foucauldian accounts, on this view, cohere poorly with the imperfect, improvised, diverse, and reflexive character of psychologists’ everyday efforts at calculation. Based on 6 months of ethnographic research in an American social psychology lab, I describe the considerable challenges my informants (faculty, graduate students, and research assistants) faced in trying to capture, predict, and characterize mental phenomena quantitatively. More importantly, I argue that these researchers were not only aware of these challenges, but also actively sought to refashion experimental control in a flexible way, not in order to quantify and calculate willy-nilly, but in order to find a good balance between rigor and verisimilitude – or experimental control and construct validity.
Directions
York University (Keele Campus)