Recognition of and through work on collaborative infrastructures: The...

As the paradigmatic case of Big Science, contemporary experiments in high-energy physics are notorious for the size of their instruments as well as the multi-national research collaborations operating them. Staying true to the traditional image of an experimentalist, physicists build and maintain those instruments and much of the technical infrastructure supporting collaborative work themselves. This presentation analyses how ‘technical’ or ‘service’ work – that is, work tending to the commonly shared hardware and software instruments and infrastructures of an experiment – is distributed and valorized in a research collaboration with several thousand members. It focuses on the perspectives of doctoral students in the ATLAS collaboration, the research collective running one of the four major particle detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. For most of these students, the first contact with their research collaboration consists in a mandatory ‘qualification task’, a technical task that is required to become a co-author of collective publications. In this sense, ‘technical’ contributions are constitutive of full collaboration membership, and they remain a precondition for other forms of distinction awarded by the collaboration. However, not all kinds of technical work are equally visible and rewarding. These tensions result in differing degrees of affective engagement with this work among doctoral students – from excitement and enthusiasm to a feeling of working “into the void”. Applying Honneth’s distinction between recognition as ‘respect’ and recognition as ‘esteem’, I show how struggles for recognition of technical contributions keep resurfacing even where a system of counting and rewarding such contributions has been established.