Epistemic cultures in undergraduate education

In this study, we introduce undergraduate research as a powerful, knowledge-rich experience that may counteract instrumental approaches to teaching and learning. We conceptualise undergraduate research experiences as socialisation into epistemic cultures. This paper challenges conceptions of undergraduate learning by suggesting that students can be experientially inducted into ways in which knowledge is produced in a given field. We draw on Knorr Cetina's work on epistemic cultures to demonstrate how students become a part of the ‘machineries of knowledge production’ as they participate in undergraduate research. We illustrate and develop this conceptualisation with an ethnographic research project in archaeology education. This empirical case exhibits how students internalise, reject and renegotiate the epistemic cultures of archaeology – and how these processes of learning and knowing are thoroughly relational, embodied and affective. Our study emphasises the significant potential of ‘other’ kinds of learning experiences in shaping students as epistemic subjects.<br>