A primary theme of Traweek's work is the crafting of knowledge by anthropologists, astronomers, historians, and physicists. She studies how communities of scholars make and transmit their knowledge, how they come to agreements or dispute each other, and how they gain professional standing and financial resources to do their work. It takes a broad ethnographic approach to studying physicists and laboratories by describing the lifetimes of members in the community, the ways of artifacts populate and impinge on the culture, descriptions of scientific practice, and the ethnographer's reflections on her own role as a researcher. In
Beamtimes and Lifetimes, Traweek describes variations in the way physicists approach their work and the nature of knowledge in physics; for example, she compares how experimentalists and theorists relate to detectors and the results that are produced from them. For experimentalists,
particle detectors are proof of their skill as scientists; whereas theorists are more likely to minimize how the specifics of detectors shape the data or the scientific process. She studies the ways physicists and astronomers worldwide learn to work together on addressing loss of funding or expansion in their research facilities. In the mid-1980s, the high energy physic facility in Japan, KEK, mushroomed because construction of TRISTAN (Transposable Ring Intersecting Storage Accelerator in Nippon) was completed. The lab director-general relayed to Traweek that it was named after Wagner's opera, “with the love and dreams for our science research.” Peopling Traweek's account of this expansion are the Japanese researchers who commuted back to Tokyo every weekend because they didn't want their children to go to local schools, the local man who navigated the bureaucracies of auto rental on behalf of foreign researchers, wives of Japanese researchers who wrote a visitors guide for foreigners, and graduate students from around Asia who didn't think they had developed long-term research relationships with the Japanese research professors. Looking at strategic uses of national, regional, class, & gender differences throughout her work, Traweek explores the ethics, aesthetics, and narrative strategies of physicists and their social environments. Since 2009, Traweek has turned her attention to the ways digital data practices are changing and shaping scholarship, such as the development of new digital modes of scholarly communication and diverse styles of digital knowledge making. She studies new digital strategies to audit and evaluate scholarship, and then to allocate resources for scholarship. == Criticism ==