UCLA

Remote scientific research settings embody a long-term combination of extreme conditions, physical boundedness, and blurred boundaries among work, play, and sleep that challenge traditional notions of how individuals perceive and interact with infrastructure. In such settings, individuals often use creative outlets to form social bonds with on-site colleagues and to document and share their experiences with distant friends and family; furthermore, they frequently—and often unconsciously—practice a more pragmatic form of creative work as they manipulate station infrastructure and use limited materials in innovative ways to facilitate work and domesticate an austere living environment. Despite the critical implications of polar science, the creative processes at work in everyday life in polar research settings have received little scholarly attention. This research seeks to bring attention to this overlooked but important area of study by exploring how, and to what purposes, science and creative work interact through material, technical, and social infrastructures and how these interactions support scientific knowledge production.

This research uses literature from information studies, STS (particularly infrastructure studies), sociology, cultural geography, anthropology, and history to ground the ethnographic fieldwork—primarily participant observation—conducted over two-and-a-half months at an Arctic research station during the 2018 summer field season. Subsequent semi-structured interviews with scientists and support staff from the same station augment the ethnographic fieldwork.

This research finds that Infrastructural Hypervisibility is a characteristic of ICE research environments, and that with time, insiders learn Infrastructural Hypervigilance, the ability to effectively interact with station infrastructure and prioritize issues that arise with it; in work life, this interaction is particularly important to scientific knowledge production and science-adjacent activities such as maintenance, repair, and planning. Infrastructural Hypervisibility can be unsettling, and as such, people push back against this visibility through Infrastructural Normalization, thereby lessening the foregrounding of infrastructure. Sociality plays a key role in normalization, and within sociality, making and sharing are crucial. Creative work, however, is not just related to sociality, it is also a key component of science that directly relates to the maintenance, repair, and planning work that is so crucial to knowledge production in ICE environments.