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In the course of his research career, much of which was based in his own classrooms, Wolff-Michael Roth explored numerous new theoretical frameworks when the old ones proved to be unable to account for the data. In this book, surrounding 11 of his publications spanning 20 years of work, the author tells a story of how science education research concretely realized and singularized itself. That is, rather than taking sole credit for the work that ultimately came to bear his name, Roth develops a historical narrative in which his work came to realize cultural-historical possibilities inherent in the field of science education. But perhaps because some types of this work came to be realized for a first time, Roth's research also came to be characterized by others in the community as "cutting edge." This work, therefore presents as much an auto/biographical narrative as it presents a cultural-historical recollection of science education as it unfolded over the past two decades.

Preliminary Material /W.-M. Roth -- Auto/Biography and Auto/Ethnography: Finding the Generalized Other in the Self -- Greater Objectivity through Local Knowledge /Angela Calabrese Barton and Darkside -- Fictive Imagining and Moral Purpose: Autobiographical Research as/for Transformative Development /Les Pereira , Elisabeth Settelmaier and Peter Taylor -- Auto/Method: Toward a Dialectical Sociology of Everyday Life -- Scientific Experience and the Researcher's Body /Franz Breuer -- Unraveling the Allure of Auto/Biography /Alberto Rodriguez -- Auto/Biography and Ideological Blindness -- Auto/biography and Critical Ontology: Being a Teacher, Developing a Reflective Teacher Persona /Joe Kincheloe -- Becoming an Urban Science Educator /Kenneth Tobin -- A Rose in a Mirror /Margery D. Osborne -- Using Webs of Narrative to Explore Negotiation of Meaning and Practice /David R. Geelan -- Transacting with Auto/Biography in the Teaching of Elementary Science /Judith A. McGonigal -- Biomythography in Teacher Education /Sharon E. Nichols and Deborah J. Tippins -- Boundaries and Selves in the Making of"Science" /Margaret Eisenhart -- Vagaries and Politics of Funding Educational Research -- A Snake in the Nest or In a Snake's Nest: Peer Review for a Female Science Educator /Kate Scantlebury -- Grave Tending: With Mom at the Cemetery /Carolyn Ellis -- The Write of Passage: Reflections on Writing a Dissertation in Narrative Methodology /Chaim Noy -- Becoming and Belonging: Learning to Do Qualitative Research /Stuart Lee and Wolff-Michael Roth -- Home and Away: Self-Reflexive Auto/Ethnography /Christiane Kraft Alsop -- What Bang for the Buck? Usefulness of Auto/Biography and Auto/Ethnography to Collective Knowledge /Franz Breuer and Wolff-Michael Roth -- Index /W.-M. Roth.

Standard approaches to the analysis of crisis situations either take some psychological stance, where the individual is the unit of analysis, or they investigate groups of actors taking turns, where individuals act following their own interpretation of what others have done. Philosophers have characterized these two approaches as self-actional and interactional. Actions and interpretations clearly can be assigned to one or the other actor, which allows allocating the responsibility for a violent event to someone "culprit." A radically different, rarely chosen approach is a transactional one, where each action is understood as joint action both in space and in time that cannot be decomposed into independent individual contributions. In this paper, following a sketch of the differences in the epistemological under- pinnings between standard and transactional approaches, exemplifying analyses are presented and discussed from a violent encounter that left a streetcar passenger dead and a police officer before the courts of justice for homicide. Discussion topics include the attribution of cause and effect, understanding the historical trajectories of participant actors, and the consequences of analyzing events in terms of events (not substantive entities, and inter-actions).

Constructivist (constructionist) epistemologies focus on ethics as a system of values in the mind - even when previously co-constructed in a social context - against which social agents compare the actions that they mentally plan before performing them. This approach is problematic, as it forces a wedge between thought and action, body and mind, universal and practical ethics, and thought and affect. In this contribution, I develop a transactional approach to ethics that cannot be developed within constructionism. In a once-occurrent world, every act is ethical because it has consequences for the agent (who affects and is also affected), and the world as a whole. However, whereas many in the social sciences continue to articulate a theory of action and thus the practical nature of ethics in terms of the individual's act, in this contribution I show that the act always already is spread across people and things and, thus, is an integral and constitutive part of a transaction. This utterly relational take on human behavior thus undermines approaches to ethics that are based on the individual as unit of analysis. Most controversially perhaps, I exhibit how those who may feel hurt by the actions (talk) of others are themselves agents affecting those others and, thus, answerable. This approach is illustrated in the context of power-knowledge, which is the result of an always ongoing, only once-occurrent situated and situational struggle rather than something a priori distributed between people.

The translation of research texts between different languages is a possible impossible (ROTH, 2013). With translation come serious dangers for theorizing when words are translated into terms that do not cover the same conceptual field. This study investigates one such instance, which pertains to the difference between the social and the societal, and which possibly has devastating effects on many theories in the sociocultural, cultural-historical, and societal historical tradition. In the German and Russian versions of his works, Karl MARX used apparently quite distinctly the equivalents of the English adjectives "social [sozial, social'nyj]" and "societal [gesellschaftlich, obščestvennyj]." Many scholars do not distinguish the two notions, and in English, both are translated into "the social." This article exhibits the conceptual distinction MARX makes by explicitly tying the emergence of the universal to society (exemplified in value) rather than to any smaller social group. In this vein, some phenomena, such as consciousness or the psyche are virtually always societal [gesellschaftlich, obščestvennyj]. Implications are sketched for the possibility of quite differently reading philosophical and psychological works in the MARXIAN tradition when the distinction is made.

Much qualitative research involves the analysis of verbal data. Although the possibility to conduct qualitative research in a rigorous manner is sometimes contested in debates of qualitative/quantitative methods, there are scholarly communities within which qualitative research is indeed data driven and enacted in rigorous ways. How might one teach rigorous approaches to analysis of verbal data? In this study, 20 sessions were recorded in introductory graduate classes on qualitative research methods. The social scientist thought aloud while analyzing transcriptions that were handed to her immediately prior the sessions and for which she had no background information. The students then assessed, sometimes showing the original video, the degree to which the analyst had recovered (the structures of) the original events. This study provides answers to the broad question: "How does an analyst recover an original event with a high degree of accuracy?" Implications are discussed for teaching qualitative data analysis. (author's abstract)

"In an increasingly globalized world of research, communicating with scholars in the same language and culture and with scholars from other cultures and linguistic background is a sine qua non in/of all sciences, including those using qualitative social research. The nature of language is at least latently recognized especially by those scholars who communicate with their peers in a non-native language, such as English, which has become de facto the scientific lingua franca. Although many are aware of the difficulties of rendering something a scholar wants to say in another language, the nature of language as a non-self-identical process is hardly if ever articulated. Instead, the metaphysical idea of the same 'meanings' that can be rendered in multiple languages by means of translation - literally, 'carried across' - is endemic to the scientific culture. In the very definition of science (e.g., in the description of research methods), experiments must operate the same (must be reproducible) wherever and by whomever these are conducted. In this contribution to the debate concerning translation, conducted in the context of the FQS debate 'Quality of Qualitative Research,' I articulate theoretical and pragmatic dimensions on the topic, drawing on empirical investigations, literary works, and philosophical investigations to explicate how translation is both theoretically impossible and pervasively achieved in/as everyday praxis." (author's abstract)

In qualitative research, accounts of experience are often taken for the experience itself despite ample phenomenological research that has articulated the difference between the living presence and the presence of the present, which requires representation. In this contribution, I provide practical examples that exhibit the difference between two aspects of mathematics that form an irreducible pair: living/ lived mathematical work and accounts of mathematical work. Directions for the future practice of research are provided.

Auto/ethnography has emerged as an important method in the social sciences for contributing to the project of understanding human actions and concerns. Although the name of the method includes "ethnography," auto/ethnography often is concerned exclusively with an abstract (i.e., undeveloped) and abstracting understanding, and therefore the writing, of the Self rather than the writing of the "ethno." Auto/ethnography, such conceived, is a form of therapy, in the best case, and a form of narcissism and autoerotic relation, in the worst case. But because the Self exists in relation to the world, becomes in and through participation in everyday events, and because the human relation is inherently ethical, there are inherent ethical questions where the Other may come to be harmed as much as the Self.

Radical uncertainty is a concept currently debated, for example, in the economics literature to theorize the impossibility of foreseeing the outcomes of scientific and technological development work. The purpose of this study is to extend the concept to articulate and theorize the minute-to-minute transactions in scientific laboratories. Empirical materials resulting from five years of ethnographic work in one laboratory focusing on fish vision are used to show how scientists produce a material continuity between some natural phenomena and the way they are represented in scientific discourse. Because the outcomes of scientists' actions (i.e., observations) sometimes turn out to be uncertain, the material (practical) actions that produce this continuity themselves retroactively become uncertain. Scientists may at any one point determine that what they had done is not what they thought and said to have done. Actions and the objects they produce therefore stand in a dialectical relationship: they produce, mutually presuppose, and in their respective materiality, stabilize one another.