Situational Analysis in Practice: Mapping Research with Grounded Theory

Adele E. Clarke is Professor Emerita of Sociology and Adjunct Professor Emerita of History of Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, USA. Trained by Anselm Strauss, she has been using and teaching grounded theory since 1980. She is author of Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory after the Postmodern Turn (Sage, 2005) which won the Charles Horton Cooley Award for a distinguished book. Clarke also received the Bernal Prize for Outstanding Contributions from the Society for Social Studies of Science and the 2015 Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology from the Medical Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. Carrie Friese is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. Her initial research focused on assisted reproductive technologies for humans and endangered species including the development of interspecies nuclear transfer (aka cloning) for species preservation in zoos. Her book Cloning Wild Life: Zoos, Captivity and the Future of Endangered Animals (NYU Press) appeared in 2013. Friese's new ethnographic research project explores animal husbandry and care in scientific knowledge production including transnational comparisons of care practices and their regulation. She has used situational analysis across these research projects, and has given talks and taught courses on the method across Europe. Rachel Washburn is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, USA. She has used situational analysis in her doctoral research on the history and contemporary politics of human biomonitoring and subsequent articles on the same topic. Her dissertation, Measuring the Chemicals Within: The Social Terrain of Human Biomonitoring in the United States , was awarded the Anselm Strauss Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2009. She has given talks and workshops on Situational Analysis at universities in the United States and Canada.