Sharon Jean Traweek is associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies and History at University of California, Los Angeles. Her book Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, which explores the social world of particle physicists, has been cited in thousands of books and articles relating to the sociology of science and translated into Chinese in 2003.
Career
In 1980, Traweek began teaching for the Stanford University Program in Values, Technology, Science, and Society. She was a professor in the MIT Program in Anthropology and Archeology as well as the Program in Science, Technology, and Society from 1982-1987. Afterward, she went to the Rice University Anthropology Department. She has been a professor at UCLA since 1994. She also held visiting faculty positions at the Mt Holyoke Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, the Anthropology Department at the University of California at San Diego, the Program in Values, Technology, Science, and Society at Stanford University, and Sokendai, the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, in Japan. In 2020 Traweek was awarded (along with co-recipient Langdon Winner) the Society for the Social Studies of Science's Bernal Prize, awarded to "outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology."
The modes of inquiry Traweek employs include collecting oral histories, conducting archival research, and performing ethnographic fieldwork. Her talks, given in over a dozen countries, span the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, history, information studies, Japan studies, science and technology studies, science education, and women's studies. The Danforth Foundation, the Fulbright Association, the Luce Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Japanese government are among the financial support for her work.
Themes
A primary theme of Traweek’s work is the crafting of knowledge by anthropologists, astronomers, historians, and physicists. She studies how communities of scholars make and transmit their knowledge, how they come to agreements or dispute each other, and how they gain professional standing and financial resources to do their work. Her research on astronomers and physicists has focused on large, distributed collaborations that circulate through a very few laboratories globally. By describing rhetorical and informal communication, such as physicists talk about their detectors, Traweek attends to the contextualization of discourse. Her work illustrates that knowledge practices occur not only in the mind, but also in embodied forms such as apparatus, symbolic representation, journals, institutions, habits of bodies, and routines of practice.
Her book, Beamtimes and Lifetimes, is an ethnographic study of disciplinary formation within a research community. It takes a broad ethnographic approach to studying physicists and laboratories by describing the lifetimes of members in the community, the ways of artifacts populate and impinge on the culture, descriptions of scientific practice, and the ethnographer’s reflections on her own role as a researcher. In Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Traweek describes variations in the way physicists approach their work and the nature of knowledge in physics; for example, she compares how experimentalists and theorists relate to detectors and the results that are produced from them.
For experimentalists, particle detectors are proof of their skill as scientists; whereas theorists are more likely to minimize how the specifics of detectors shape the data or the scientific process.