Constructing (Inter)Disciplinary Identities: Biographical Narrative and the Reproduction of Academic Selves and Communities

Interdisciplinarity has become prominent in science policy and academia because of its potential to lead to more interesting, innovative and responsible research. However, its implications for the development of academic careers and identities are not well known, partly because different disciplinary communities regard it differently. Shedding light on how academic identities are constructed and negotiated in the context of interdisciplinary research, this chapter presents a discourse analysis of the biographical narratives that scholars from different disciplines—including mathematics, computer science, economics and archaeology—articulated during qualitative research interviews. The analysis illustrates how these narratives allowed the interviewees to identify themselves as members of specific disciplinary communities, having the personal traits these require, and emphasizing or playing down their interdisciplinary moves accordingly. The findings suggest that individuals’ biographical narratives deserve careful attention because they contribute to the establishment, reproduction and maintenance of academic disciplines. Consequently, they have the potential to make the narratives that constitute the ‘core’ of a discipline become, little by little, more heterogeneous.

The Epistemic Importance of Novices: How Undergraduate Students Contribute to Engineering Laboratory Communities

Scholars and practitioners have long viewed learners as works-in-progress and as somewhat empty vessels to be filled with appropriate knowledge and skills to become future expert practitioners. However, based on an ethnography of two engineering laboratories, I found that laboratory members regularly swap the roles of learner and instructor, regardless of their status as an undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a faculty member. Furthermore, undergraduate students make crucial contributions to their research communities in the form of knowledge, creativity, and opportunities for other members to learn and build relationships through teaching. What, then, do the identities of “novice” and “expert” mean in practice? I argue that it is more productive to define the identity of a community based on mutual learning and epistemic exchange rather than on expertise.

Community by Template? Considering the Role of Templates for Enacting Membership in Digital Communities of Practice

This chapter attends to how the concept of “communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, learning in doing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991) has been taken up by managers and policy makers in trans-local contexts. Although the concept was developed for co-located communities, it was transferred to distributed settings. In such settings, the sharing of practices is not necessarily active, and the performance of community not necessarily tied to their sharing. Some of the ambiguities of the original concept became problematic. The chapter is based on two vignettes that demonstrate how community is understood by policy makers and managers as a form of organisation that needs to be cultivated and coordinated. Continuing on the success of “communities of practice”, a focus of such striving became the sharing of experiences (and “good practices”) in order to foster community building. In a trans-local context, this meant—for the actors responsible for building community—a focus on how practices may be shared actively. One answer to this challenge was to describe local practices in standardised templates. However, different ways of organising the sharing of knowledge objects (e.g. who are the actors that define the structure of templates or how do they determine what counts as ‘good practice’) resulted in different forms of communality.

What Synthetic Biology Aims At: Review Articles as Sites for Constructing and Narrating an Emerging Field

The analysis of scientific communities and collectives are central to STS and sociological studies of science. However, the current emergence of techno-scientific communities, such as synthetic biology, raises the question as to whether novel identities, but also novel ways of community building have developed. In this respect, the emergence of a new publication regime, the ubiquity of citations as a means of governing attention and visibility, and the establishment of multidisciplinary audiences might have changed the ways of scholarly field formation. In this article I propose that formats of scholarly writing have acquired new functions in this process, changing modes of presenting and legitimating novel scientific communities. Hence, I put forward the idea that the evolution of a specific publication format which I term here as `techno-scientific review article’ and the ways of narrating communities are closely intertwined. To elaborate my argument, I draw on linguistic genre analysis of science. I found that review papers in synthetic biology are important for the field: Equipped with specific textual qualities they become central sites for articulating past and the futures of the field.

The Project-ed Community

Projects have become crucial devices in the practice and governance of research. Drawing on the participant ethnography of a two-year interdisciplinary project on microbial bioenergy, this chapter inquires how projectification translates into collective research dynamics. It argues that to understand what projects are and how they affect research practices and communities, it is necessary to look beyond their influence on the organisation of research work. Seeking to delineate the project as a group, the chapter analyses three versions of the project-ed community: in documents, in institutional arrangements, and in daily research. This shows that projects cannot be reduced to temporary arenas of research. They are also argumentative devices that justify and display the excellence and relevance of specific scientific endeavours, as well as projection devices – they serve to imagine future research communities and to start building them. In that, projects are highly strategic entities that integrate scientific practices into coherent narratives to further the interests and ambitions of various parties; but they are also enmeshed in practical matters, because to build communities, researchers have to develop concrete repertoires that are materially embodied.

Being a ‘Good Researcher’ in Transdisciplinary Research: Choreographies of Identity Work Beyond Community

Different contemporary developments are challenging the notion of a rather exclusive and lasting belonging of individual researchers to the one disciplinary community into which they had been socialised, to which they subsequently contribute, and which they reproduce. In turn, the very meaning of community is challenged when there is a perpetual exchange of community members. This chapter deals with how researchers with diverse and dynamic relations to different collectives develop a self-understanding of what it means to be a good researcher, i.e. what the normative ideals are that they should strive for. It is empirically analysed how researchers who engage in transdisciplinary research occasionally or regularly narrate, adopt, translate, resist, and combine the different imaginations of being a good researcher that they encounter. The sensitizing concept of ‘choreography’ is proposed to analyse the identity work done under conditions of multiple and flexible belongings that is held together by a certain style, rhythm, and pattern. In this sense, a specific way of moving constitutes an identity in the first place by aligning otherwise separate belongings.

Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience

This introductory chapter begins with the empirical example of synthetic biology, a case that has challenged our own thinking, provoking us to re-address the concepts of scientific ‘community’ and ‘identity’ in contemporary technoscience. The chapter then moves on to a delineation of the conceptualisations of community and identity in past sociologies of science, highlighting open questions, promising avenues and potential shortcomings in explaining contemporary conditions. Following this, the individual contributions to this volume are presented, including their analyses on community and identity constellations and the related effects on the contemporary technosciences as institutions, practices and living spaces. This is achieved with a focus on common themes that come to the fore from the various contributions. In a final discussion, we take stock of our attempt at re-addressing community and identity in contemporary technoscientific contexts and discuss where this has brought us; which ambiguities could not be resolved and which questions seem promising starting points for further conceptual and empirical endeavour.

Tracing Technoscientific Collectives in Synthetic Biology: Interdisciplines and Communities of Knowledge Application

The relevance of collectives for scientific research has long been a matter of debate among sociologists of science and STS scholars. In this article, I revisit the notion of scientific communities from the perspective of practices in technoscientific fields of research. The case I focus on is synthetic biology, a field of research characterised by introducing engineering principles to biology. Drawing from field observations, a discussion of community concepts in sociological literature and interview data, I argue that concepts of community in the technosciences oversimplify the aspects and types of collectives that come to matter in research practices. The case of synthetic biology suggests that, when thinking about technoscientific communities, we have to consider aspects of research practices that point beyond knowledge production. To address this issue, I propose the notion of communities of knowledge application, which helps to reflect current trends in technoscientific research and research governance. Both contexts of knowledge production and contexts of knowledge application should be taken into account in an analysis of technoscientific communities.

‘Big Interdisciplinarity’: Unsettling and Resettling Excellence

This paper analyses differences in group perceptions amongst a large international and multi-disciplinary research community. It is a cluster of excellence with the explicit aim of bringing natural sciences and humanities together in joint experiments. Who wins, when disciplinary borders fall? The article discusses the moment of the appearance of the cluster on the grounds of a thorough analysis of the notions of interdisciplinarity, excellence and the recent history of European research policy. This empirical study of the forms of knowledge, practices and behaviours that intersect with differences of cultures, disciplines and gender in this community is part of self-reflexive structures that were installed within the cluster research on research practices. The results show that this new form of structure of ‘big interdisciplinarity’ offers the formation of new (collaborative) identities to those involved. New forms of group minority and majority understandings emerge, which, in contrast to the expectation of the cluster at the beginning don’t seem to advantage usually disadvantaged identities in science.

Performing Science in Public: Science Communication and Scientific Identity

This chapter examines the identity work that takes place within public communication of science. Using a conceptualisation of identity as performance – and thus as something that may be done differently within different contexts – it uses the case of a large science festival, Science in the City, which took place in Copenhagen in 2014, to examine how scientific identities can be enacted in science communication. The key argument is that such communication supports multiple and flexible identity performances. Scientific identities are intertwined with other ways of performing the self, and both audiences and communicators are heterogeneous communities, which do not neatly sit in categories of ‘scientists’ or ‘the public’. Ultimately, it appears that science communication is used by scientists (and others) for many different identity-building purposes, in many different ways.