The Smithsonian Institution Exhibition of "Science in American Life": Science as It Consists of Normalized Practices

Social studies of science have yielded a general understanding of the values and normative structure of scientific discovery, but we can benefit from its further specification and respecification as a social achievement. The sociostructural mechanisms that both create and sustain scientific activity are documented, in part. This article employs data from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History—the "Science in American Life" exhibition—to investigate how museum representation, and critiques of the representation, as a context for communication amongst and about members of the scientific community, define and solve the problem of "science." The mechanisms of normal science (social and cognitive norms), are reexamined in a situated context of publicly accessed discourse. The history of science is claimed to be as functionally imperative to science as is the laboratory experiment when both modes of communication are interpreted as part of a broader social situation. If science consists of a set of practices "made sense" of in the context of "finding the phenomenon," both and all affirmations and disruptions to this activity make science recognizable as what we all know it to be. Talk "about" science "is" science; facts are not found, they are inseparable from, embedded in the social apparatus that makes them apparent as "facts." The "Science in American Life" exhibition and its critiques (the topic for discussion, those speaking, and the medium of communication) are as much the occasion for normalizing human relations as is the work of science—of making the phenomenon apparent—as peer review journal discourse and as laboratory activity.