Scientific Habitus: Power and Ignorance in the Scientific Institution

• In Event: Institutions and Ignorance: New Directions in the Political Economy of Science

Abstract

Drawing on the emerging literature in ignorance studies, this paper provides insight into how scientists’ daily laboratory practices and institutional experiences are related to the social production of ignorance. Based on an ethnography of university-based science laboratories, I describe how scientific habitus shapes the mode of production of scientific knowledge and ignorance. Scientific habitus denotes the institutionally nurtured system of dispositions of scientists’ mind and body that classifies good projects and bad projects, good data and bad data, and good scientists and bad scientists. Scientists learn how to characterize unfunded research project as obsolete and done, while internalizing productivity and publishability as rules of the game in the scientific field. In the field of bioenergy research, the consequence of this scientific habitus was scientists’ more passive than strategic adaptation to the Trump administration’s new agenda toward the development of bioproducts instead of renewable energy. These practices are self-governed and collectively reinforced under the institutional matrix of competition-oriented research university. I argue that scientific habitus is a new analytical lens that explains the social shaping of scientists’ worldviews as well as the mechanism through which political and economic power influences the scientific field’s production of ignorance.

Author

• June Jeon, University of Wisconsin-Madison