A Passion for Science: Addressing the Role of Emotions in Identities of Biologists

Abstract

As part of their socialization, scientists acquire the skills and know-how of the job and become part of a scientific community, its norms and values. Becoming part of a scientific community also involves that scientists adapt to its emotional culture. Emotional relationships, specifically the concept of passionate work, represent important repertoires in and for academia especially considering academic identities. In light of precarious employments and unstable academic futures, the researchers emotional relationships with their profession are tenuous. I accordingly ask: what role does passion have in scientists’ narrations of work experiences? And how does this play out in researchers’ identities? Based on interviews with biologists, I analyse how the scientists narrate passionate tales and explore how they recount their past and how they imagine a future generation of scientists. Specifically, I analyse the scientists’ stories of the past as productive for a particular rationale and storyline of their identity bringing forth qualities of a passionatescientist. These tales not only represent individual experiences but show how an emotional relationship to the science profession provides an exclusive belonging and serves to create and maintain a powerful disciplinary ideal. Consequently, I provide a jigsaw piece for understanding further how scientists build their identities and how these identities mirror today’s science cultures.

Training scenes: Taking science studies to the classroom

“…A deeper analysis of training processes is seen as a desideratum by Bulpin and Molyneux-Hodgson (2013, p. 102): 'More systematic analysis of the production of scientists is needed and may in the process reshape our thinking on disciplines.' In Kastenhofer and Molyneux-Hodgson's (2021) recent volume, some contributors touch upon 'the functions that graduate and PhD students fulfill' (p. 16) as well as upon other issues of academic professionalization-an example being Schönbauer's (2021) exploration into the educational biographies of biologists. Of its 14 chapters, only one delves into the perspectives of novices: Wylie's (2021, p. 158) case study examines how undergrad lab assistants, depicted as 'broadly-educated outsiders', shape the research culture of engineering labs and 'provide influential injections of creative and diverse thinking' (p. 159).…”