Atmospheres of science: Experiencing scientific mobility

Abstract

This article uses notions of the atmospheric to engage with empirical material concerned with international mobility in science. It draws on recent conceptual work on atmospheres that frames them as allowing access to the affective qualities of everyday life and as ‘productively nebulous’: atmospheres exist between the local and the globally diffuse, the emergent and the staged, the intangible and the brutally present. Using atmospheric thinking, I devise ‘apparatuses of attunement’ to capture elusive aspects of life in science, as discussed in interviews with natural scientists about their experiences of international mobility. In particular I use ideas of the situation, atmospheric threads, and the staging of atmospheres to argue that scientists represent themselves as existing in between the particular and the general: they are never wholly at the mercy of the structures and expectations of globalized science, but are also never not in the grip of them. In closing I reflect on what this analysis reveals about the affective qualities of contemporary science, the forms of life being nurtured by the norms and expectations of research (policy), and the kinds of agency available to (these) scientists. The aim of the article is thus twofold: to demonstrate how concepts of atmospheres can be put to work in STS, and to contribute to research on international mobility in science and contemporary scientific careers.

Affecting Infrastructures: Crafting and Weaving as Alternative Repairs

“…Textile work helps me to stay in the moment, to embrace weaving by engaging with it (Mann 2018), to stay within the materiality of weaving and within a subjectivity that I remake through my corporeality (Foster 1996). From the materiality of my body and the fabric, from the pain of the past, it became possible to establish a connection and attunement (Davies 2021;Mora-Gámez and Davies 2023) with the stories of the women of Artesanías Choibá. Our shared ground was my and their individual and collective bodies, the places from which I and they weaved the garments and our emotions.…”

Luck and the ‘situations’ of research

“…They experienced a ‘driving force’, or had decided ‘this is going to be my career’. On the other hand they explained their career trajectories through terms such as ‘random’, ‘happenstance’, ‘coincidence’, ‘accidental’, or ‘arbitrary’, often presenting their lives in science as a series of choices or changes that were more or less outside of their control and that were structured through a mix of personal and professional factors (see Davies, 2021 ). ‘The path is shaped while you walk’ (Interview 5, Norway).…”

“…For Davies (2021), 'thinking with atmospheres' is a means of becoming attuned to 'the tensions and non-coherences' of researchers' accounts of their careers (p. 228), one that is attentive both to the affective regimes of science and to the multiplicities of their accounts. The notion of the 'situation' (Berlant, 2011;Stewart, 2011) is central to this.…”

“…In a series of studies that explore experiences of contemporary academic work and practice (e.g. Davies, 2020 , 2021 ; Davies & Horst, 2015 ), we have found that luck is a repeated refrain, one threaded through the accounts of researchers and scientists. It is never the main thing that our interlocutors discuss, but it persistently recurs as an aspect of narrations of careers and work practices.…”