“I Don’t Care Who Rules in the White House”: Boundary-Training in Science and Everyday Politics of Knowledge

ABSTRACT

How do scientists construct the meaning of science as oppositional to politics? How do the institutional contexts of scientists’ work environment, training processes, and peer-group interactions reflect scientists’ understanding of scientific practices, rules of the scientific field, and themselves as scientists? I argue that scientists’ practice of boundary-work between science and politics is institutionally nurtured by a series of processes, which I call boundary-training. Drawing on ethnographic research at a molecular biology laboratory, this article reveals various tactics of boundary-training. Scientists are trained to routinely consume material infrastructure and produce massive scientific data. They internalize productivity-oriented academic life and valorize controllability in science labs to achieve this goal. Individuals’ self-reliance and survival become core virtues of scientific enterprise. All combined, scientists are trained to believe that their works are irrelevant to social and political circumstances. This mundane depoliticization of science contributes to the consequence that the scientific field becoming a more efficient apparatus of political and economic powers.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of knowledge
• boundary-training
• boundary-work
• laboratory ethnography
• institution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Chungnam National University (CNU) and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Notes on contributors

June Jeon

June Jeon is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). He received his doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in civic science at Tufts University. His research on science, power, and inequality has appeared in Social Studies of Science, New Media & Society, and Socius, among others.