Agential Conversations: Interviewing Postdoctoral Life Scientists and the Politics of Mundane Research Practices

Abstract

Science and Technology Studies (STS) projects often aim at understanding social problems and epistemic challenges in science and, more generally, in the technoscientific worlds we inhabit. However, it is often unclear if and how these projects can help address the problems they identify. Scholars such as Donna Haraway, John Law, and Karen Barad have argued that STS methods always interfere with the contexts they study. Combining this insight with recent feminist scholarship on the politics of care in technoscience suggests that a better understanding of how our research practices already interfere can help us attune our methods in order to promote care as part our research practices. One avenue to investigate this hypothesis is to return to a completed study and reconstruct how its research methods have created interference effects that promoted or could promote care for the problems the study identified. In the case at hand, the methods investigated are interviews with life scientists in Austria and the USA. The problem they defined is that current career rationales in the life sciences, which foreground individualism, mobility, and competition hinder collaboration, teamwork, and mentoring, strain group cohesion, and tend to exclude certain groups. Reframing the research interviews as ‘agential conversations’ that interfered with the contexts they sought to understand shows how the interviews also created situated moments of reflection, connection, and disruption that could serve as a basis for responding to these problematic conditions affecting researchers in the life sciences and beyond.

Key Words:

• interference
• qualitative interviews
• care
• feminist theory
• life sciences
• postdocs

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on research conducted in the project ‘Living Changes in the Life Sciences’, funded by GEN-AU/BMWF, at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna (Project leader: Ulrike Felt; main collaborators: Maximilian Fochler, Ruth Müller; http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/en/research/completed-projects/living-changes-in-the-life-sciences/). The re-analysis of the interviews was performed at UC Santa Cruz in April and May 2011. Müller's research visit was funded by a research and travel fellowship of the University of Vienna and hosted by the Science & Justice Research Center, where Martha Kenney was a fellow (http://scijust.usc.edu). The authors would like to thank Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, and Jenny Reardon for their intellectual, practical, and financial support in developing this paper in collaboration across distance. Further we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their feedback and guidance, Ellen Barka for introducing us to Janet Finch's work, and Cornelia Schadler for reading and re-reading the paper in its various incarnations.

Notes

1 See e.g. http://www.scienceintransition.nl/english or http://am.ascb.org/dora/

2 Care, in Puig's sense, is simultaneously: a way of feeling affected by someone or something, an ethico-political commitment, and the material practices that are indispensable for developing sustainable ways of living together (2011, p.90). Her work is part of an arising field of study that investigates practices of care in technoscientific settings such as hospitals, homes, farms, laboratories, and environmental initiatives (e.g. Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, and Pols 2010; Puig 2010, 2011; Martin et al., forthcoming). Care in this literature is not simply a topic of study; it is also a desirable part of doing STS research.

3 The ELSA acronym stands for ‘Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Science’

4 ‘Re-Thinking biosciences as culture and practice: tracing ‘ethics’ and ‘society’ in genome research—a pilot study. (GOLD II).’ For project details please see: http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/en/research/completed-projects/gold-ii/

5 This becomes tangible through interviewee comments on and off the record in the vein of ‘You must have similar experiences, too. You're also a researcher.’

6 This number includes 16 postdocs working as group member scientists, 2 postdocs with special fellowships that allowed them to have a small research group for themselves, and 3 researchers who had not formally finished their PhD research at the time of the interview but were already focused on the postdoctoral academic labor market. Müller conducted 14 of these interviews herself.

7 Despite our use of the term ‘sensitizing concept’ this paper does not follow a traditional grounded theory approach. However, it is inspired by the grounded theory notion of situated theorizing with sensitizing concepts, which can be tweaked in continuous conversation with the empirical specificities of the study (Clarke, 2005, pp. 28–29).

8 See also Felt (2009) for similar results coming from studies in other European countries (e.g. UK and Czech Republic).

9 For example, The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine. Available at http://www.jnrbm.com/about