“CERN runs on a lot of goodwill and fascination”: Emotional drivers o...

What keeps a technically and organizationally enormous enterprise such as the experiments in contemporary high-energy physics running? Not least, the emotional investments of its constituents and a shared excitement for technoscientific progress, which resonate with traditional conceptions of a scientist’s vocation as well as affect-driven contemporary tech culture. Despite concerns that the lack of discoveries and the ensuing ‘crisis’ within the scientific community might discourage young scientists from pursuing a career in high-energy physics, the publicly displayed enthusiasm for its technological prowess seems undeterred.

Based on interviews with doctoral students and post-docs working in high-energy physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, this talk explores affective attachments to technoscientific work and the role of emotions in the socialization of novice researchers. In accounts of their experiences as members of large international collaborations running particle detectors and experiments, junior researchers describe a passion for technology development, the pride of participating in a unique endeavour, and the capacity to instil fascination for one’s work in others as the emotional drivers of their work. Working in large research collaborations, however, is also associated with feelings such as loneliness, frustration, and being invisible, which disaffect young researchers from their work and their community. I analyse the valuations carried by such expressions of emotion and (dis-)affection and show how junior researchers reflexively identify with and distance themselves from collective affects and expectations. Between professed devotion to the collective effort and self-preserving scepticism, the emotions expressed in interviews convey an inherent ambiguity rooted in the precariousness of junior researchers’ personal futures and the future of the discipline as a whole.