Narrating and Comparing in the Organization of Research Projects

Abstract

Comparisons are ubiquitous in the history of political thought, in the arts and in the sciences. They seem crucial to our understanding of the cultural and natural world as well as to the establishment of social norms. Doing comparison is here understood as an activity which is always situated within cultural practices, enforcing certain ways of comparing and suppressing others. At the same time, these practices lead to the dominance of particular comparisons over others and may thereby strongly shape social discourses, as the recent example of public communication in the case of the coronavirus pandemic shows. Studying how doing comparisons influences social life thus means to gain more information about the processes which are initiated, altered or stabilized by the use of comparison in particular contexts, e.g. in political conflicts, in the development of economic markets, or in the making and professionalization of art and science. The study of the practices of comparison should also allow us to gain further knowledge about the ways in which