Community and Identity in Contemporary Technosciences

This open access edited book provides new thinking on scientific identity formation. It thoroughly interrogates the concepts of community and identity, including both historical and contemporaneous analyses of several scientific fields. Chapters examine whether, and how, today’s scientific identities and communities are subject to fundamental changes, reacting to tangible shifts in research funding as well as more intangible transformations in our society’s understanding and expectations of technoscience. In so doing, this book reinvigorates the concept of scientific community.

Readers will discover empirical analyses of newly emerging fields such as synthetic biology, systems biology and nanotechnology, and accounts of the evolution of theoretical conceptions of scientific identity and community. With inspiring examples of technoscientific identity work and community constellations, along with thought-provoking hypotheses and discussion, the work has a broad appeal. Those involved in science governance will benefit particularly from this book, and it has much to offer those in scholarly fields including sociology of science, science studies, philosophy of science and history of science, as well as teachers of science and scientists themselves.

Editors: Kastenhofer, Karen, Molyneux-Hodgson, Susan (Eds.)

Table of contents

• Making Sense of Community and Identity in Twenty-First Century Technoscience
• Success of a Research Speciality at the University of Strasbourg (1961–2011)
• What Synthetic Biology Aims At: Review Articles as Sites for Constructing and Narrating an Emerging Field
• The Emergence of Technoscientific Fields and the New Political Sociology of Science
• Self-Organisation and Steering in International Research Collaborations
• The Project-ed Community
• The Epistemic Importance of Novices: How Undergraduate Students Contribute to Engineering Laboratory Communities
• Tracing Technoscientific Collectives in Synthetic Biology: Interdisciplines and Communities of Knowledge Application
• Community by Template? Considering the Role of Templates for Enacting Membership in Digital Communities of Practice
• Performing Science in Public: Science Communication and Scientific Identity
• Being a ‘Good Researcher’ in Transdisciplinary Research: Choreographies of Identity Work Beyond Community
• Constructing (Inter)Disciplinary Identities: Biographical Narrative and the Reproduction of Academic Selves and Communities
• ‘Big Interdisciplinarity’: Unsettling and Resettling Excellence
• A Passion for Science: Addressing the Role of Emotions in Identities of Biologists