Why "From Case to Phenomenon"? Reflections & Implications

My purpose in this concluding essay is not to critique or assess the other contributions; Rudy Sil and Erica Simmons have already done the job—fairly, critically and constructively (Sil and Simmons, this symposium).1 Rather, my intention is to reflect upon how we —as a discipline— got to this symposium, where the design apparatus (multi-sited phenomena), methods and ethics are quite different from, say, case studies and their logic of controlled comparison. Such reflection necessitates that I interrogate a broader set of contexts: disciplinary, philosophical, methodological and ethical.