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This article notes that research policy and early laboratory studies resonate in foregrounding the laboratory as an important place and agent in producing valued research output but tend to gloss over the complex processes by which laboratories are built and sustained over time as well as the significance of non-Western histories. Drawing on multisited ethnography in laboratories located in the geopolitical East of Europe, it examines the articulations and tensions between performing laboratories as locales and as locations of scientific excellence across a range of heretofore underexamined online and offline sites, including group seminars and institutional Web pages. By drawing attention to enterprising modes of performing achievement and lab organization, the article shows how the laboratory is also a policy actor and reproduces Westward-oriented knowledge geographies. Pointing to care as a mode of ordering, it further explores different forms of material and affective labor that are obfuscated in such performances but build and sustain the lab as local-global assemblage. The article concludes by discussing the policy implications of making this labor visible.

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This article explores what the concept of epistemic community can contribute to studies of science and technology and to existing analytical frames of epistemic cultures, technosocial network and community of practice. Reviewing conceptions of epistemic community in political science, organisational studies and feminist epistemologies I suggest that heuristic dimensions include a focus on historical contingencies and timings; on particular epistemic projects and technologies that work as boundary objects; and on epistemic responsibilities and stratifications. These dimensions are further explored in two research vignettes. The first vignette follows the mobilisation and expectations of the Czech synchrotron user community at a funding event as a focal point for examining epistemic responsibilities and the genderings of community. The second vignette follows a biographical narrative about being and becoming a member of an epistemic community and amplifies the importance of different configurations of community. I argue that the contours, distributions and textures of an epistemic community cannot be studied at a single analytical site such as the laboratory and conclude by outlining what can be gained by using a refined concept of epistemic communities and sketching some strategies for further research.