Tag: Science

My project focuses on European large-scale research in the post-Cold War. Did European big science change after the end of the cold war? And if yes, how and to what extend? While some scholars treated big science as an exclusive feature of the Cold War, it did not vanish away with its end. Seemingly echoing Alvin Weinberg’s words from the early 1960s, “Big Science is here to stay”, a widespread sense emerged among those studying big science that large-scale research is a seemingly enduring phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century, but it changed throughout the last decades.

The notion of big science is still elusive. Discussions frequently centre on What makes big science a particular way of doing research? and To what extent does it differ from other, smaller research projects? To bring some clarity to this fuzzy conceptual framework, I may introduce the notion of big science laboratories. Although it does not appear as a truly innovative idea, it may shed systematic light on the understanding of big science as well as it may help me to structure my conceptual as well as empirical work. For those who have never heard before of big science, but would like to gain a first impression, I recommend the readings from John Krige (2003) and Olof Hallonsten (2014) (see below).

Big science laboratories (as I understand them) have a massive material centrepiece – such as accelerators or light sources. They are geographically identifiable locations where scientific practice and materiality are physically co-located, but access is limited. The spatial distinction between inside and outside the laboratory is in some cases also an epistemological one: Karin Knorr Cetina for instance regards laboratory work in general as a detachment of objects from their natural, temporal and territorial regimes that she terms “enculturation”. Laboratories do not stage phenomena, but manipulate them. However, a general epistemological distinction between internal and external factors that bear independently upon the course of science is an unproductive way of analysis. These laboratories look like fenced-off scientific enclaves, but politics have quite real material, practical and discursive dimensions in these spaces.

I have been trained in political science / international relations (IR) and sociology. I also started to study physics and a strong focus on experimental physics let me certainly fall in love with large-scale experimental equipment. My project adopts a slightly different perspective as it has been so far the case for many big science studies. It focuses on the role of (international) politics arguing that to speak of European big science laboratories as entirely politicized is as much a naiveté as to speak of them as being politically neutral. While this is certainly nothing new for scholars of science and technology, it brings me to a conceptual middle ground for mutual learning between big science studies and IR theory.

While the study of big science is already widely spread among various academic fields, the discipline of IR still lacks a conceptual repertoire to handle the dynamics of large-scale research in the international system. The relationship between international relations and big science seems , however, particularly obvious. Politics matter when large sums are invested and different cultures melt in collaboration, when Nobel Prize-worthy discoveries are at stake and research and development touch upon issues of national security, power and economic growth. The site selection processes as well as the necessary financial long-term contributions and commitments by the member states have ever been subject to heavy political contestation.

General methodological reflections in IR have often been too narrow and in many cases, science and technology are limited to exogenous, residual factors in the international system. Moreover, the exclusive focus on the state-as-actor is insufficient for a nuanced understanding of the big science-international politics nexus. Materials, scientists, experts and tools rather easily challenge traditional understandings of the state and its territorial limits of authority. They wave together global connections of in-kind contributions and expertise, transnational collaboration and commitment.

I read Bruno Latour, Andrew Pickering or Sheila Jasanoff (see below), but none of these approaches really satisfied me. I came across some papers that have been published from IR scholars trying to conceptually bridge IR theory and science studies (Mayer and Acuto (2015) or Herrera (2003), both have been really inspiring!). They adopted one of the classics in the history and sociology of science and technology: John Law’s and Thomas Hughes’ ideas on sociotechnical systems. Law’s paper On the Social Explanation of Technical Change. The Case of the Portugese Maritime Expansion (1987a) has really provoked an aha-moment and I strongly recommend reading it! I also recommend a second paper from Law that is quite similar to the first: Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion (1987b). And of course: Thomas Hughes’ Networks of Power (1983).

Their approach(es) provide a valuable middle-ground that enable both IR theory and big science studies to grasp and trace agency beyond formal political contexts and institutions. By neither favoring social nor technological explanations, it intends to treat science and technology as endogenous variables of the international system refusing instrumentalist and externalist perspectives. The sociotechnical approach also enables me to trace big science’s dialectic change throughout the last decades emphasizing how new forms were built upon the old without total replacement and to what extend there is both, novelty and continuity. Asking for the “how” instead of the “why” challenges IR’s most fundamental orientation: Understanding order instead of change.

Readings:

Hallonsten, Olof (2014). The Politics of European Collaboration in Big Science. In: The Global Politics of Science and Technology – Vol. 2, Mayer, Maximilian, Carpes, Mariana and Ruth Knoblich (eds.), 31-45, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Herrera, Geoffrey L. (2003). Technology and International Systems. In: Millennium. Journal for International Studies 32 (3): 559-593.

Hughes, Thomas P. (1983). Networks of Power. Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila (Hg.) (2006). States of Knowledge. The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order. London: Routledge.

Knorr Cetina, Karin (1999). Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Krige, John (2003). The Politics of European Scientific Collaboration. In: Companion to Science in the Twentieth Century, Krige, John and Dominique Pestre (eds.), 897-918. New York: Routledge.

Law (1987a). On the Social Explanation of Technical Change. The Case of the Portugese Maritime Expansion. In: Technology and Culture 28 (2): 227-252.

Law, John (1987b). Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion. In: The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas P., and Trevor J. Pinch (eds.), 111-134, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mayer, Maximilian and Michele Acuto (2015). The Global Governance of Large Technical Systems. In: Millennium. Journal of International Studies 43 (2): 660-683.

Pickering, Andrew (1995). The Mangle of Practice. Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.