#170: Everyday Science, Everyday Bodies: A Situated Framework for Scientific Sensemaking

Everyday life is saturated with encounters that demand scientific sensemaking: interpreting a fever, adjusting a recipe, or managing a power fluctuation. Yet such sensemaking rarely draws solely on formal knowledge. This conceptual paper proposes a framework of Embodied and Adaptive Scientific Sensemaking in Everyday Life, which explains how people make sense of science through bodily, social, and material engagements that extend beyond school learning, often initiated through sensory and embodied interaction with phenomena. Using a two-part methodology, we first develop a conceptual synthesis integrating scholarship on the bodily, cultural, affective, technologically mediated, and intuitive-adaptive dimensions of everyday sensemaking. We then employ fictional ethnography to refine and illustrate the framework’s generative logic, alongside three real-life ethnographic cases that demonstrate its functioning in everyday contexts. The framework positions everyday scientific sensemaking as an emergent, recursive system in which the body, as the site of experience, mediates the interaction of multiple dimensions to produce locally meaningful understandings of science, reframing science as a lived, interpretive, and adaptive process.