There are two kinds of often intertwined arguments accounting for innovative appraisals of the current developments in scientific landscape. The first maintains that science is not in any way different from other social realms and can be characterized by unprecedented dynamization (or acceleration) observable on various levels and in different dimensions that constitute scientific activities. The second position, often stemming from the first, is exemplified in our analysis through critical engagement with Dick Pels’s notion of ‘unhastening science’. Pels’s position holds that it is essential for science to ‘slow down’ in order to, among other things, fulfill its socio-economic and cultural role, if not live up to its raison d’être. In this article, we problematize this binary view and argue for a more nuanced perspective advancing the temporal complexity of scientific knowledge production. By drawing on historical examples, specifically Andrew Pickering’s notion of temporal emergence grounded in his study of Donald Glaser’s invention of the bubble chamber, and by developing our temporal reading of Bruno Latour’s Pasteurization of France, we carve out three interactive categories capturing the temporal dynamics of science production: experimental, cognitive and institutional temporalities. We subsequently argue that science production is underpinned by agentic synchronization of these temporalities. Drawing on our argumentation in conclusion, we oppose the popular tendency to understand time in science in a reductive sense.

Despite the growing body of literature that critically assesses the ambiguous impacts of institutional review boards (IRBs) on anthropological research, the key standards on which the IRB evaluations are based often remain unquestioned. By exposing the genealogy of an undercover research in which the authors participated as ethnographer, supervisor, and research participant, this article problematizes some of these standards and addresses the issues of power dynamics in research, informed consent, and anonymization in published work. It argues that rather than addressing genuine ethical dilemmas, IRB standards and the ethical fiction of informed consent mainly protect researchers from having to openly face the uncertainties of fieldwork. As an alternative, the authors put forth the notion of c/overt research, which perceives any research as processual and, in effect, becoming overt only during the research process itself. As such, it forces researchers to cultivate sensitivity to research ethics.

In this article, we examine and discuss observations on projectification from organizational and management studies and contextualize them with recent insights from the discourse around social acceleration. Against the backdrop of these debates, we ethnographically inquire into project work strategies in fusion research. First, we briefly survey existing scholarship that interrogates acceleration and projectification of research. Second, we explain why we focus on projects in fusion research and introduce the site of our investigation. In the third section, we identify three project work strategies in fusion research: content adjusting, temporal stretching, and (de)consolidation. In the final part, we argue that the highlighted project work strategies emerge as a product of the dialectical interplay of projectification and stabilization contexts that yields new spaces and opportunities for crafting agency and negotiating time in research that go beyond the reductive fast/slow dichotomy that nowadays tends to characterize contemporary accounts of temporality in and of research.