Local science, global knowledge : science and nation after socialism in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, Russia

This dissertation explores the changing relationships between science, the state, and global capital in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center (Akademgorodok). Since the collapse of the state-sponsored Soviet "big science" establishment, Russian scientists have been engaging transnational flows of capital, knowledge, and people. While some have permanently emigrated from Russia, others travel abroad on temporary contracts; still others work for foreign firms in their home laboratories. As they participate in these transnational movements, Akademgorodok scientists confront a number of apparent contradictions. On one hand, their transnational movement is, in many respects, seen as a return to the "natural" state of science - a reintegration of former Soviet scientists into a "world science" characterized by open exchange of information and transcendence of local cultural models of reality. On the other hand, scientists' border-crossing has made them - and the state that claims them as its national resources - increasingly conscious of the borders that divide world science into national and local scientific communities with differential access to resources, prestige, and knowledge. While scientists assert a specifically Russian way of doing science, grounded in the historical relationships between Russian science and the state, they are reaching sometimes uneasy accommodations with the globalization of scientific knowledge production. This ethnography argues that what counts as science - what makes science recognizable in a particular context - is more than what goes on in laboratories, but implicates how scientists imagine themselves to be part of national and even global communities.

Note: Abstract extracted from PDF file via OCR.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-03-14 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:36:35.