ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

How Does an Inscription Device Take Its Place? : Tracing the Ongoing Construction of Laboratory Infrastructure

• In Event: Wells, Labs, and Corridors: Situated Infrastructures and the Production of Scientific Knowledge

English Abstract

The laboratory has long been central to STS as the site where scientific ideals are materialized and scientific knowledge is produced. Although earlier laboratory studies have emphasized its locality and situatedness, they have paid far less attention to the material relations through which laboratories take shape through their surrounding environments.
This paper extends Latour and Woolgar’s notion of the inscription device by bringing it into conversation with the concept of infrastructure. Using this dual lens, I examine how a laboratory—understood as an inscription device—takes its place within historically sedimented material and institutional arrangements. Tracing the construction of a chemistry laboratory in a South Korean university, I show how its formation hinges on negotiations with accumulated infrastructural layers that both enable and constrain its realization. The process also involves the movement of inherited instruments and the circulation of practices from retired professors’ laboratories, which carry with them the material afterlives of earlier scientific work and require ongoing, often invisible, labor of alignment and maintenance.
I argue that while a new laboratory emerges through adjustment to these sedimented infrastructures, once established it recursively participates in—and subtly reshapes—the broader research infrastructure that receives it. By following these mutually constitutive processes, the paper highlights the temporal and material life of university research infrastructure and repositions the laboratory not only as a site of scientific practice but also as an infrastructural formation continually under construction.

Author

• Yeonwha Kim, Seoul National University