ABSTRACT
The chapters by Cathy O’Connor, Lynne Godfrey, and Bob Moses (chap. 4) and Susan Leigh Star (chap. 5) both emphasize the importance of lived experience to science. They both probe the relationships among legitimacy, science, and identity, each foregrounding a different aspect of the tension between lived experience and the detachment (or detachability) of scientific observation. Star’s chapter is an icon, a monument to its content. Jarring in a conference and in a volume on intellectual practices, her very personal account illustrates how carefully the personal has been extracted from scientific discourse. She calls attention to embodied, private, continuous experience: intensely personal and tightly attached to the self, and to the paradox that, in extracting the personal from our scientific practice, we also extract the genius.
