Constructing 'Do-Able' Dissertations in Collaborative Research: Impro...

In many natural science disciplines, doctoral training takes place in research groups, where students collaborate with other scientists and contribute to a collective research goal. Although collaborative research plays an essential role in the training of young scientists, there is yet no dedicated study on how individual dissertations are carved out of collaborative research projects, and how dissertations are made “do-able”, that is, feasible and worth doing from both the individual and the collective point of view. This question is particularly pronounced in contemporary high-energy physics, where experiments involve thousands of researchers and unfold over several decades. Based on qualitative interviews with researchers working in the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, my paper traces out what it takes for a dissertation project do be “do-able” in this context. I describe two different kinds of “alignment work” that researchers engage in when constructing do-able research projects, and I show that they are based on different kinds of agency concerning collaborative “rhythms” of work. While the do-ability of research projects is a matter of achieving alignment between contexts of work and organizational rhythms both internal and external to the research collaboration, their academic value as dissertations requires a break of this alignment, such that individual contributions become visible.