I illustrate a trajectories-of-semiotic-becoming perspective through a lifespan case study that follows one biologist-in-the-making, Nora, our daughter, who is now a 30-year-old post-doc. The research is based on life-history, semi-structured, and text-based interviews; formal and informal observations; a collection of texts that reach back to her elementary school years; historical contextualization of the place of biology in home and community life; and memory. I am also collecting data on two other biologists: Nora's husband, Ben, and their close friend and colleague, Matt. Nora is an active co-researcher in this project, providing long-term cooperation, and the research has emerged from our on-going lives. Nora, Ben, and Matt have signed IRB-approved informed consent forms and chose to be represented under their actual names.

I have described the typical methods I use in detail in the appendix of my book Writing/Disciplinarity: A Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy and in my chapters in What Writing Does and How It Does It (Prior, “Tracing Processes”; Leander and Prior). I am also drawing on Roozen and Erickson's discussion of methodology, where they lay out ways of identifying and interpreting the laminated, long-term ontogenesis of practices through interviews and document collection that cross domains across the lifespan. The video reflection below addresses what is probably most striking about this case study, focusing a lifespan study on my own family. The video here focuses on methodological and epistemological questions I have gotten about researching people I am so entangled with. A second set of questions the case study has raised for some focuses on the implications of a case study of a scientist who came from an academic family: I address those questions in the conclusions section, particularly in the final video.

Transcript