Abstract
This chapter is based upon on a small set of narrative interviews with mobile graduate students in the nanosciences. It examines how they conducted and reported upon their respective projects “abroad” (at selected UK and US institutions) for them to count as satisfactory expressions of research practice “at home” (at a Swiss public university). In doing so, the chapter homes in on the local configuration of new research fields from the perspective of its (potential) future members. Particular emphasis is placed on how “mobile nano-training” at MA level was conducted and reported upon in project format. The analytic focus, more specifically, is on how mobile nano-training – via project work, its emerging tensions and prospective arrangements – afforded its participants with an instructive model of research practice in the intended domains of nanoscience: how did they, its novice practitioners, “socialize” themselves into the inter- and transdisciplinary research field(s) they were expected to staff? In taking up this question, the chapter ties the theme of a field’s novelty back to its novices’ practical inquiries, thus avoiding any master narrative of its “radical novelty”, “changing nature”, or “essential tensions”. The chapter, instead, is cast as a reflexive ethno-inquiry (Carlin, Qual Res 9:331–354, 2009; Slack, Ethnogr Stud 5:1–26, 2000).
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Notes
- 1.
Pseudonyms are used to name both institutions and persons. All of them are kindly acknowledged. So are an anonymous reviewer, Sara Keel, Martina Merz, and Max Fochler for their critical remarks, and the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support. As ever, none of these parties bears responsibility for the ensuing analysis.
- 2.
For the purposes of this chapter, “innovation” is understood as research conducted in view of a new (or enhanced) technological device of potentially economic or more broadly societal interest. For further discussion, see Godin (2008).
- 3.
Students, in other words, were not simply confronted with “essential tensions” (cf. Hackett 2005) or even exposed to a “reality shock” (cf. Delamont and Atkinson 2001). Rather, they were being trained in dealing with, and from within, a situation that they had themselves created, or at least contributed to create.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
Out of the yearly cohort of 30–40 MA students at the SNC, only a “top third” would embark on the “mobile nano-training” program on offer. Most of the interviewed students (8 in total) were contacted with the help of the local curriculum coordinator. The interviews were conducted in 2011–2012.
- 7.
“Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes” (Goffman 1967a: 5). “[F]ace-work […] designate(s) the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face” (ibid.: 12). In what follows, the “face” in question will be that of prospective, mobile nanoscientists as they presented themselves in conversation.
- 8.
When applying for the SNC travel grant, prospective mobile nano-students would have to sign an “agreement for the duration of the project work” (to avoid “research [to] drag on disproportionally”). The resulting “correspondence problem” was partly anticipated in the guidelines, as they limited the official purpose of the 2-month projects to practical training in project planning, laboratory skills, and analytical thinking, rather than “completely new experiments”. No such caveat was provided for the 6-month MA thesis.
- 9.
The interviewed students led me to distinguish between their “mentors” and “supervisors”. Whilst the former were typically senior figures advising the students on career options without themselves standing in a formal teaching and/or research relationship with them, the latter would typically be engaged in such a relationship with students. In the context of mobile nano-training, the “learning contract” mentioned above constituted the principal expression of this relationship (see Sect. 13.2).
- 10.
For his MA thesis, Ivan stayed 3 of the scheduled 6 months at the US lab, whilst Martin stayed only 1 month of 6 in the US. The remaining 5 months were used by him to refine the initiated simulation method and write up his MA thesis at the SNC.
- 11.
Instead of soliciting a senior mentor or being solicited by a future colleague, other MA students, interested in mobile nano-training, would be motivated by family and friends, student comrades, hearsay, ask their local supervisors and/or check out exchange programs (e.g., ERASMUS). They presumably constitute the “silent majority” of which I have interviewed two members.
- 12.
- 13.
For the purpose of interaction analysis, this excerpt has been transcribed in detail. The transcription conventions are included in the Appendix.
- 14.
In the interview I didn’t accept Ivan’s account and pursued the matter further. Ivan though would withhold details, downplay the problem once more, and finally blame it on the equipment. Whatever the actual case may have been, we are a far cry from the “reality shocked” students depicted elsewhere (cf. Delamont and Atkinson 2001).
- 15.
For space considerations, the ensuing excerpts have been transcribed in less detail than the previous one.
- 16.
To manage one’s “face” (as suggested by Goffman), in other words, is incidental to the social practice of which it offers an individualized expression (as investigated by Garfinkel 1967).
- 17.
The expressions in quotation marks – “emigrants” and “home comers” – are the author’s glosses to mark the encountered difference in career orientations. The quotation marks indicate the glosses’ analyzable character.
- 18.
Helen and Simon, the mobile couple of nano-physicists, emphasized the quality of life and the wish to have children (at least Simon) as additional motives to return to Switzerland later (i.e., after PhD completion). Yet they did not account for any current SNC promotional activities abroad – unless “getting abroad” is understood in its transdisciplinary sense, as required by the SNC’s mobile nano-training program (i.e., in view of developing a technological innovation).
- 19.
The key shift in conceptual terms is from using a developmental scheme (which implies conventional career stages to analyze socialization) to examining how such a scheme is used by participants themselves to account for their unfolding activities (as the mobile nano-students did when drawing upon the project format of their experimental work to account for that self-same work). For further discussion, see Keel (2014).
- 20.
In Goffman’s terms, they thus appeared as “persons who have what they want and do not want what they haven’t got” (cf. 1953: 340, note 1). Now and again, they seemed thus prone to display “pride” (ibid.).
- 21.
If the charted tensions appeared to be project-bound, and in particular bound to the requirement of an innovative project, these tensions in turn can also be seen to be dramatized, if not crystallized by the students’ commitment to academic mobility.
- 22.
Although Kuhn himself emphasized that “research under a [disciplinary] paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change” (1996: 52). The same can potentially be said of mobile nano-training, as suggested in the next and last paragraph.
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Sormani, P. (2016). Practicing Innovation: Mobile Nano-training, Emerging Tensions, and Prospective Arrangements. In: Merz, M., Sormani, P. (eds) The Local Configuration of New Research Fields. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22683-5_13
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