Reading Writing/Writing Reading On Epistemic Work with Scientific Texts

This paper examines writing and reading as epistemic practices. It bridges a gap within the social study of science which results from treating both the production of knowledge within local research practice and the publication of knowledge within scientific discourse as separate phenomena. This study, as a consequence, investigates the writing and reading of texts through which researchers produce and make communicatively available knowledge for themselves as well as for others. It is by way of these practices that the local production of knowledge is oriented towards the discourse of the epistemic community. In other words, reciprocity in the production of scientific knowledge is accomplished and realized by the bodily and discursive work of writing and reading texts.