Abstract
Although sociologists have explored how political and economic factors influence the formation of ignorance in science and technology, we know little about how scientists comply with external controls by abandoning their prior research and leaving scientific innovations incomplete. Most research in science and technology studies (STS) on ignorance has relied on structural and historical analyses, lacking in situ studies in scientific laboratories. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the habitus of ignorance as a mechanism of the social production of ignorance. Scientists have a set of dispositions that establish practical contexts enabling them to ignore particular scientific content. Leaders of the organization repeatedly legitimate the abandonment of unfinished projects, while ordinary laboratory scientists internalize the normalized view that the scientific field is inherently opportunistic and that unfunded research should be left undone. A cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance by actors at distinctive positions within the organization provides a mechanism of social control of scientific knowledge. As the mechanism is habitually self-governed by the rules of the game of current scientific institutions, the result is an indirect, although deeply subjugating, invisible and consolidating form of political and economic domination of the scientific field.
Keywords
Introduction
Scientific research projects experience both births and deaths, depending on economic and political support, and this is ever more apparent in the current US political regime, where a radical reallocation of resources is taking place. For example, the recent decrease of national support for environmental science research has been particularly acute: According to the congressional budget proposal in 2018, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) biological and environmental research program faced a 42.7% budget cut compared with 2016, and overall the science program’s budget was reduced by 16.4%. In the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) environmental research programs, many research projects, including renewable resources research and greenhouse gas reporting research, have been discontinued (see Table 1).
Environmental program budget changes in science funding agencies, 2016–2018.
(DOE, 2017, 2018; EPA, 2018; USDA, 2018).
What are the implications of these changes for scientists and the scientific knowledge they produce? Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have shown how national science policies are often directly related to national economic, health, military, and environmental policies (Clarke et al., 2003; Jasanoff, 1990; Jasanoff and Martello, 2004; Kevles, 1995; Kleinman, 1995), particularly how these policies ‘kill’ scientific research programs and leave particular unknowns – therefore, ignorance – behind (Gross and McGoey, 2015). The concept of ‘undone science – areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or ignored but that social movements or civil society often identify as worthy of more research’ (Frickel et al., 2010: 444) – has highlighted the discrepancy between the outcomes of institutionalized science and civil society’s needs, asking us to consider who has the power to determine what we know, what we should know, and what we should ignore (Frickel and Moore, 2006; Frickel and Vincent, 2007; Hess, 2007, 2016; Moore et al., 2011; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008).
However, resource allocation is only half the story. During volatile changes in science policies, scientists persevere, and most find ways to survive by changing their research focus or making their research appealing to alternative funding streams (Hoffman, 2017; Rushforth et al., 2018). What forms of creative agency allow scientists to accomplish this? How do volatile changes in political and economic structures and science policies affect the daily lives of scientists in scientific organizations? How do scientists consent to ignore unfunded research topics? How do they make sense of external changes and controls, and how are they implicated in the social production of ignorance?
I show how scientists’ institutionalized and internalized efforts have brought about the social abandonment of particular scientific topics. I aim to examine the mechanism of power not via coercion by social structural resource allocation, but via the long-term construction of scientists’ dispositions to classify scientific projects, migrate to fundable research projects, and accept and legitimate such decisions. In other words, that scientists consent to drop their previous research agenda and legitimate their move from ‘obsolete’ projects to newly defined ‘promising’ research topics, poses a puzzle for the mechanisms of power in the social production of ignorance; it raises the question of how the political and economic domination of the scientific field is legitimated and how domination goes invisibilized and reproduced by those who are dominated (Bourdieu, 2001).
Although I reveal agential dimensions of scientists’ perceptions and practices, it has relational and institutional dimensions. By ‘relational’, I mean how relationships among scientists influence available actions; this mechanism is by no means driven by a homogeneous group of scientists. Rather, various scientists of various occupational statuses – from graduate students to principle investigators – participate in the classification and selective relinquishment of scientific projects. On a more institutional level, scientists are embedded within the scientific field that promotes a common point of view and mode of thought via training and professionalization processes. Seemingly agential and temporal characteristics are, in fact, the manifestation of the cumulated history that scientists embody and exercise. In this way, ignorance is not an output of ‘black-boxed’ organizational processes determined by social structural inputs; rather, it is an object that is constantly challenged, negotiated and maintained by scientists.
This article focuses on a national environmental science organization during the funding crisis since the beginning of the Trump administration. I analyze US national bioenergy research policy and its effect on scientists in an organization called the Advanced Bioenergy Center (ABC, a pseudonym) to survive the recent environmental funding crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at the ABC, I show how it adapted its internal dynamics to abandon projects – increasing undone science – in response to external directions. I argue that the political and economic shaping of science involves what I call a ‘habitus of ignorance’, or systems of dispositions to ignore particular scientific content and topic. Scientists internalize, normalize and legitimate these dispositions as rules of the game of the scientific field. The habitus of ignorance results in concerted organizational efforts such that scientists comfortably accept and rationalize external directions by abandoning their prior research and leaving scientific innovations incomplete. During this collective practices, external political and economic pressures remain invisible to scientists.
The habitus of ignorance is exercised differently, albeit in cooperative ways, by scientists at distinct positions within the organizational field. The scientific organization is a space of position-takings where scientists – principle investigators, post-docs, graduate students and undergraduate trainees – adopt various practical strategies. Leaders of the organization repeatedly legitimate this abandonment by demarcating the ‘done’ science, which they see as being taken-for-granted and unpromising for future inquiry, from ‘better’ projects at the scientific frontier. Projects are jointly redefined as ‘done’ by new policy signals and scientists’ new consensus. Ordinary laboratory scientists internalize the normalized view that the scientific field is inherently opportunistic, and professional scientists should be able to embrace the fate that some research topics should be discarded. The habitus of ignorance results in this cycle of legitimation and acceptance of ignorance by actors at distinctive positions within the organization. The mechanism is self-governed by scientists who internalize the meritocratic rules of the game of current scientific institutions. Therefore, it constitutes an indirect, although deeply subjugating, invisible and consolidating form of social control of scientific knowledge.
Theories of ignorance: Structure, strategy, and organization
How do social forces shape what we do not (have to) know? In STS and the sociology of organizations, we find a number of explanations in which ignorance is socially organized, yet scientists’ perspectives have been less studied. Currently, there are three complementary theories, all of which focus on structural and organizational aspects. First, sociologists have theorized and illustrated how socioeconomic structures and elite institutions shape what will be researched, ignored or framed as uncertain. From the outset, the concept of undone science highlights the discrepancy between institutionalized scientific knowledge and civil society’s needs (Frickel et al., 2010; Gross and McGoey, 2015; Hess, 2007, 2016). In this view, ‘knowledge tends to grow … in directions that are consistent with the goals of political and economic elites’ (Hess, 2007: 22). As a result, scientific knowledge for social elites is accumulated, whereas science for marginalized communities (e.g. causality between environmental pollution and health impacts, alternative energy research, or alternative treatments for cancer) is systematically discouraged. Scholars working on ‘agnotology’ contribute to this perspective, arguing that social structural causes could be behind anything we identify as uncertain or unknown (Oreskes and Conway, 2010; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008; Tuana, 2004). Using as examples the manufacture of uncertainty among those who deny climate change or the adverse health impacts of tobacco, they emphasize how political and economic forces often directly manipulates scientific knowledge in favor of a few powerful actors.
Second, the concept of strategic ignorance indicates that elite institutions and organizations are capable of and have explicit intentions and interests in deploying societal ignorance for the service of their own interest. It answers to the question of how an organization – a meso-level playground of embedded individuals – plays a role in the social production of ignorance, orchestrated by the power inequalities at the structural level. Ignorance is an extractable resource for powerful social groups. McGoey (2007) and other scholars have introduced case studies demonstrating how bureaucratic, regulatory, or financial organizations strategically used the rhetoric of unknowns to establish and maintain a rationale for their existence and secure positions of power. For example, financial experts may frame a financial crisis as a consequence of unknown economic mechanisms rather than as a consequence of fundamental flaws in the capitalistic market system (Davies and McGoey, 2012). The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) intentionally remained silent to maintain its relationship with a pharmaceutical industry when negative impacts of anti-depressants became a public issue (McGoey, 2007). Here, the explicit intention is key. While the information transparency of powerful organizations is fulfilled in modern society, those organizations, as an alternative strategy, purposefully obscure the problem in order to reproduce their positions of power without compromising the transparency of the organization.
Last, scholars of organizational sense-making further explain how the organization members’ definition of the situation is maintained and stabilized by shared cognitive schemes (Weick, 1976, 1977, 1988; Weick et al., 2005). By focusing on a cultural-cognitive structure of the organization, the theory of organizational sense-making investigates a symbolic order – a frame of the definition of the situation (Goffman, 1974) – that helps participants to collectively make sense of their world. The symbolic order is achieved by members’ enactment: the active sensemaking process in which individuals construct, justify and secure a common perception of their world via interactions (Weick, 1977). The enacted sensemaking enables the organization to continue and remain stable even in crisis situations. Applied to ignorance studies, it agrees that ignorance can be part of an everyday culture of the organization, like the elephant in the room (Zerubavel, 2006), achieved and maintained via daily interactions that reinforce their common already established beliefs.
As such, we have a set of parallel explanations for how ignorance is socially produced. Socioeconomic structures condition the unequal resource distribution in the scientific field, and unsupported research projects become undone. Elite organizations strategically produce ignorance to maintain their privilege. Such organizational practices are conducted and stabilized by a collective sensemaking by members’ enactment. The challenge, then, is to make sense of scientists’ mode of scientific practices that work in tandem with the abandonment of structurally marginalized sciences. In this regard, I add a new dynamic – how do organizational members consent? In other words, in scientific organizations, how and why do even the most dedicated scientists who sincerely aim for the best practices of science become acclimated to the organized production of ignorance? How do they justify their actions? What are their strategies? Revealing this additional account ultimately helps understanding how the social production of ignorance is justified and non-problematized.
Investigation of such agential dimensions cannot be fulfilled without considering specific structural contexts within which actors are situated. In fact, symbolic interactionists’ account of the maintenance of the symbolic order does not give sufficient attention to structural contexts – it highlights the organization of in situ experience in the present tense (Goffman, 1974), not the organization of agency that is intertwined with past, present and future orientation (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998). Instead, new institutionalists widely agree that members of organizations are embedded within both intra and inter-organizational contexts that condition a set of taken-for-granted assumptions about their environment and actions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, 1991; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). Moreover, if we perceive the organization itself as a field, and again, imagine such organization-as-field as an actor within a larger institutional context, the Bourdieusian theory of field and habitus helps to interpret practices and worldviews of organizational members as products of position-takings (Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008). It shifts our focus from the product (ignorance) to the process (institutional context), from the structural settings (resource allocation) to the agentic dispositions (habitus). For example, Vaughan’s case study of NASA achieved this: Perceiving NASA-as-field, Vaughan (2008) argued that the Challenger launch disaster could be seen as an emergent result of members’ habitus, acquired throughout the institutional history, individual career trajectory, and work environment. Similarly, ignorance can be seen as a relational product of collaborative efforts of distinctive actors, embedded within various positions at the organizational field, with taken-for-granted routine and habitual mode of thoughts and practices.
Ethnography is a particularly useful approach to detect often invisible codes of practices and unintended consequences within the organizational and institutional context (Jerolmack and Khan, 2014; Katz, 1997, 2012; Smith, 2005). Numerous ethnographies in laboratories have revealed processes of social construction of scientific knowledge; however, laboratory ethnographers have not generally been interested in ignorance. A number of case studies have shed light on the cycle of the scientific discipline’s epistemic boundaries, the construction of undoable science, the social production of ignorance (e.g. Frickel and Vincent, 2007; Kleinman and Suryanarayanan, 2013; Suryanarayanan and Kleinman, 2016), and the involvement of civil society organizations in filling the gap of undone science (Brown, 1997; Hess, 2009). Scientists also involve in a ‘shadow mobilization’ to indirectly deploy their scientific agenda when volatile political and economic circumstances restrict their choices (Frickel, 2010; Frickel et al., 2015). There is a potential to further develop such accounts by describing how individual scientists’ routinized daily practices are related to the social production of ignorance. 1
In this article, I bring a Bourdieusian perspective to the theory of ignorance and to organizational analysis (Albert and Kleinman, 2011; Baker, 2017; Camic, 2011; Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008; Vaughan, 2008). Bourdieu’s work is useful in positioning the scientific organization as a ‘social microcosm’, where a ‘series of structural interlockings’ can be found (Bourdieu, 2004: 32). It helps in unpacking the mechanism of power by contextualizing everyday practical choices of individuals in relation to their acquired habitus (Bourdieu, 1998). ‘Habitus’ refers to a relatively durable set of dispositions that are generated by an actor’s trajectory in particular fields. It denotes a comprehensive set of internalized dispositions, including taken-for-granted worldviews and problem-solving strategies, beyond the techniques of physical body. As it is shaped by various conditions, including institutionalized educational systems, career paths and socioeconomic conditions, the habitus is a mechanism that bridges individual practices and macro-social settings (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Because of their habitus, actors ‘feel at home in the world because the world is also in him’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 143). Far from perceiving scientific organizational practices as direct representations of science policies at a distance, I frame scientists’ everyday work as a field of actualization (Bourdieu, 2005) of science policies, where forms of interactions are ‘full of suspense and surprises’. Work is an actualization of structure, not a ‘mere mechanical effectuation of the structure or as a communicative action that could be explained without taking account of the structural necessity expressed in it’ (Bourdieu, 2005: 175).
Following Bourdieusian tradition, I argue that the actual social production of ignorance can better be understood by what I call the habitus of ignorance – scientists’ set of dispositions that establish the practical sense of ignoring particular scientific contents. It allows scientists to comfortably accept ignorance and rationalize such choice. The habitus of ignorance is shaped by scientists’ career trajectories, peer group relationships and organizational strategies. I elaborate on how the habitus of ignorance effectively invisibilizes the political and economic domination of the scientific field; the scientific organization nurtures scientists who comfortably abandon unfunded research projects, leave them undone, and migrate toward the fundable research projects in accordance with the best practice of good scientists. The political and economic domains influence scientific organizations to foster the habitus of ignorance, which, consequently, allows scientists to act so that they feel are well aligned with the interest of political and economic power. Such political and economic forces, choreographing the mode of scientific practices, are invisibilized to scientists because their fundamental perception of ideal science is already deeply constructed by those forces.
Fieldwork and empirical case
From December 2016 to December 2017, I worked in the ABC as a scientist; I spent my days in the laboratory, conducting biochemistry experiments and spending time with laboratory scientists as a participant observer. From January 2018 to May 2018, I focused on conducting interviews while visiting the laboratory as a part-time scientist. During this time, the ABC went through significant changes. First, the center had to apply for funding renewal to the DOE, while the bioenergy research budget of the DOE was shrunk. Second, in response to the DOE’s new Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the center reoriented its research goal from cellulosic biofuels to bioproducts. As a result, the center successfully renewed its funding for another five years, and the new regime with new funding started on August 2017. As an ethnographer, I tried to capture how these changes happened in the center and how scientists made sense of the situation.
My method of ethnographic data collection was through full-immersion fieldwork. My educational background in chemistry influenced my positionality. I explicitly intended not only to collect the observational data of others, but also to practice observant participation (Wacquant, 2004). People at the laboratory knew that I was conducting a sociological research; however, at the same time, they assigned me routine experimental tasks and I could contribute to their work with minimal amount of training. Paired with one of the laboratory’s post-doc researchers, I synthesized a mutated DNA strand of a particular family of Glycoside Hydrolase enzyme and expressed the DNA to cultivate a new type of enzyme that could deconstruct cellulosic materials for biofuel production. I built a sample composed of participants I recruited in two ways: through direct encounters at the center’s various events and through snowball sampling. I conducted 42 interviews – 16 from principle investigators and higher administrative staff and 26 from laboratory practitioners. I have replaced all names with pseudonyms and removed potentially identifying information.
The birth of the ABC was a product of the national science policy agenda to utilize inedible biowaste for energy purposes, called cellulosic biofuels. From 2008 to 2017, national cellulosic biofuel research experienced a short golden age, until the Trump administration drastically cut funding for alternative energy research. From 2018, surviving research units have been oriented toward the synthesis of non-fuel chemicals from biowaste; at the national level, cellulosic biofuel research has been set aside. 2
Non-edible parts of farm products had long been regarded as waste, but from the late 1990s, the US government began to recognize them as a potential resource for a variety of applications. In 1999, during the final days of the Clinton administration, an executive order ‘Developing and Promoting Biobased Products and Bioenergy’ was released. Shortly after the executive order, the National Academy of Science published the national research strategy for bio-derived fuels. The Biomass Research and Development Act of 2000 (BRDA) and the Energy Policy Act 2005, followed by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA), were enacted during the golden age of US cellulosic biofuel research and development. For the purposes of developing cost-effective technology to produce biofuel, EISA enforced the establishment of national bioenergy research centers in the United States and the launching of a competitive university-based research grant program (Table 2).
Federal agencies’ obligations for cellulosic biofuels R&D, FY 2005–2008 (US GAO, 2009, GAO-09-446).
To meet technological challenges, the DOE’s Office of Science allocated a substantial budget to the Office of Basic Energy Science and Biological and Environmental Research in 2008, which launched a number of nationally funded research centers across the country. However, in 2012, the DOE determined that cellulosic biofuel was not economically feasible. Instead, it began to search for an alternative market segment from ‘bioproducts’, which are non-fuel chemicals that replace chemicals currently derived from petroleum or natural gas. National cellulosic biofuel production was still very slow: According to the RFS (Renewable Fuel Standard) plan, for instance, the national production of cellulosic biofuel was supposed to be 4.25 billion gallons in 2012, but only 0.23 billion gallons were produced, only 5.4% of the target volume. Cellulosic biofuels faced significant technical, political, and economic challenges, insomuch that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that ‘it is unlikely that the goals of the RFS will be met’ and ‘there is limited potential for expanded production of cellulosic ethanol in the next 5 years’ (GAO, 2016).
Research centers, founded by the DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Science and Biological and Environmental Research, sustained their initial research goals for 10 years following 2008, but had to radically shift in their research focus when a new FOA came out in 2016. In March 2016, the research centers received the new FOA from the DOE, which clearly stated that the next funding cycle would no longer focus on biofuels. Instead, the FOA announced that the synthesis of bioproducts would be the new focus of the program, saying ‘much progress has been already made in … transformation to ethanol’ (DOE, 2016).
In response to the DOE’s new FOA in 2016, the ABC submitted the proposal for an additional five-year renewal of the center. The proposal was fully responsive to the new FOA: The center eliminated the research program for cellulosic biofuels and reoriented its research agenda toward the production of high-profit petroleum products synthesized from plant materials. The result was successful. Despite the 42.7% budget reduction in the DOE’s Biological and Environmental Research program (see Table 1), the ABC got a funding renewal for another five years.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of research topics that were presented in the annual conference among major bioenergy research centers in the US. It reveals not only which research topics were being investigated, but also which topics were advantageous to share and celebrate. First of all, it is clear that the distribution of research topics radically shifted in 2017. From 2017 onwards, when scientists knew about the new FOA that eliminated cellulosic biofuels from the strategic plan, the portion of biofuel-relevant research decreased substantially from 19% to 6%. At the same time, scientists presented more research not only on bioproducts (from 11% to 21%) – a new area of focus, guided by the DOE – but also on a wide variety of general research that does not fall into particular categories, represented in Figure 1 and so appears in the ‘other’ category (from 11% to 21%). The question is, how did these changes take place in the organization through the interplay of scientists at various levels?
Proportions of research area in bioenergy research centers, 2013–2018.
In my fieldwork, I found that political and economic pressure works differently at different levels of the organization. In the ABC, there were two primary groups of scientists, which I call lab scientists and entrepreneur scientists. Lab scientists are mostly trainees in the organization who conduct all experiments, data analyses and day-to-day labor. In the case of university settings like the ABC, graduate students, post-doc researchers, assistant scientists and numerous non-tenure track researchers are included in this category. Entrepreneur scientists are mostly tenured, organizational leaders and principle investigators (PIs) in charge of writing grants and advising trainees. They are organizational decision makers who do not conduct experiments or collect data themselves and are generally listed as corresponding authors in the center’s published works. Professors, advisory board members and high managerial staff members can be categorized as entrepreneur scientists.
These two distinctive groups of scientists work together to cultivate an organizational climate of compliance with the funding agency’s control. Lab scientists internalize the view that the scientific field is fundamentally opportunistic and niche-driven; therefore, they develop survival strategies that comfortably ignore unfunded research topics while their self-respect as a good scientists remains uncompromised. I call this an acceptance of ignorance. Entrepreneur scientists perceive the intervention from the state power as a chance to prove organizational capability. They demarcate the done science projects (unfundable) from ‘better’ projects (fundable) and rationalize this transition with a logic of scientific merit. I call this a legitimation of ignorance. As a loosely coupled organization that ensures an autonomy of its subparts, the mode of interaction between those scientists is not entirely hierarchical and coercive. Rather, entrepreneur scientists cultivate a set of repertoires that rationalize the organization’s decisions, while lab scientists widely accept them in the context of their dispositions acquired and normalized through their training processes, career trajectory and daily interactions.
Inside the laboratory: Lab scientists and acceptance of ignorance
When I joined the ABC at the end of 2016, it was an open secret that the center was in crisis. Scientists shared the media coverage of President Trump’s attack on the EPA and the DOE. Trump suggested a 17% cut in the DOE’s total budget for 2018 and a 43% cut from the DOE’s renewable energy research program. The final decision on whether the center would receive a new five-year funding program was to be determined sometime in the summer of 2017. If the funding was rejected, the entire center would be shut down immediately. ‘We are at the lower level of the food chain’, Dr Hughes, an assistant scientist in the ABC, told me during a laboratory potluck party at the PI’s house. Dr Hughes has been at the ABC since 2008, when the center was established. His appointment with the center has been renewed annually, and his salary has been co-paid by the center and the PI’s own funding streams. As vulnerable employees, how do they perceive funding crises? How do they persevere as scientists?
Normalization of commonsense views of the scientific field
Lab scientists understand crises during moments of funding renewal as normal events. The more time scientists spend in the lab, the more familiar they become with periodic funding crises. Scientists learn how to survive by developing a worldview that the scientific field is ultimately a niche-driven and opportunistic battleground. Dr Joyce, an assistant scientist, recollected that her career was derailed soon after she received her doctorate in horticulture. She studied plant biochemistry during graduate school, but funding for her project, awarded by a local company, was redirected from what she was trained to do. When she found herself becoming less fit to the laboratory, she decided to quit her job and became a stay-at-home parent. ‘I clearly made a wrong choice. I regret it’, Dr Joyce confessed. After eight years as a non-scientist, she was lucky enough to find a part-time job in a local biotech company in 2007. Then the recession hit the industry, and her company withdrew from its research efforts. After all these detours, she came to her current post-doc position that she described as ‘academic slavery’. Crises happen all the time, and she learned that resilience is a key to survival. ‘Science is always niche-driven, … and there’s so much we just can’t even predict right now. You want to be ready to be the right person. You don’t want to burn a bridge’.
Experience with crises and survival is part of the pathway to becoming a professional scientist – what Bourdieu (1991) would call the ‘rite of institution’ of the scientific field. Dr Joyce assumed that other post-docs and assistant scientists at the center had endured similar experiences of failure and success, and she had an assumption that her colleagues shared the professional scientific mindset of a niche-driven worker. Dr Snow, a junior post-doc, called Dr Joyce a ‘veteran’ and took her advice seriously, although he had a stronger record of publication. ‘This lab, you know, this is extremely isolating because fundamentally we don’t work on a team. Each of us finds our own way to survive, and believe me, [we] listen to the veteran’, Dr Snow told me.
Scientists’ commonsense understanding of themselves as niche-driven knowledge workers is further amplified by a shared contempt for novice graduate students. Graduate students at the center were often perceived as unruly beginners who did not know what to ignore and what to emphasize. For instance, when Noah, a second-year PhD student, barely passed his preliminary exam, Dr Hughes told me that he was disappointed by Noah’s research presentation. ‘He just lectured his data peaks, nothing more. All the details and errors … So that shows how he thinks and works. That’s where he is. Yeah, exactly where he is’. When I asked what he meant by ‘where he is’, Dr Hughes paused. ‘I mean, you know, he hasn’t really grasped the core of what he is supposed to do. He hasn’t proved that he is more than a technician. Yeah, of course he has his style. But scrutinizing all details … I mean, where is the publishable part? What is he aiming for?’ Dr Snow said that he saw his past in Noah’s unruly presentation. Sneering, he predicted: ‘He’ll learn how to do the research for his career. You’re not getting paid to do anything you just want to do’.
This commonsense understanding was maintained by the voluntary leave of those of who could not deal with crises. Scientists who were seriously concerned about and shocked by external influence often could not remain scientists. Remaining members reinforce the collective self-identification as niche-driven workers by distancing themselves from dropouts. Dr Cox, a third-year post-doc, began to circulate his CV within the biochemical industry when the center was writing its new proposal at the end of 2016. ‘I don’t know if I believe this’, Dr Cox confessed. ‘I don’t think I really am motivated by the mission of the center. I never really was … And, now I am writing a proposal about something I don’t find any value [in]’, he complained. When he was called back by a local biotech company, he happily left the center. The rest of his lab members celebrated and blessed his career in front of him; however, after he left, lab members began to blame his narrow mindset and skills. ‘We don’t really feel any difference without him, do we?’, Dr Joyce told me during lunch in the lab kitchen. ‘No, Jack [the undergraduate researcher] is taking his role’, Dr Hughes replied. ‘You know, it’s … not a super difficult science (laugh)’. Dr Joyce smiled at me: ‘Yeah’. Although it was not explicit, it was clear to me that lab members were looking down on Dr Cox. He ran away because his science was not good enough; indeed, it could be carried out by an undergraduate. He left because he did not deserve a seat. The remaining members, eating lunch together in the kitchen, were a circle of veterans in good standing who knew how to survive, shared the common sense that the crisis is normal, and embodied the strategies needed to comply with the control from external worlds.
The crisis of the research program and the time needed to find the niche for its survival were perceived as normal, inasmuch as scientists embrace it as part of their professional ethos. Trump was, of course, new, but not entirely new for them when seen through the lens of crisis. In other words, scientists are trained to internalize the commonsense of the scientific field – the set of unquestioned assumptions that legitimate members of the field attain through the rite of institution. When scientists internalize the commonsense knowledge that the trajectory of a research project is contingent upon unexpected policy changes, they develop a set of dispositions that enable them to strategically play the rules of the game of science. They perceive science to follow niche-driven and meritocratic rules; therefore, they are blind to external control, or take it for granted. Scientists do not see themselves as constrained but instead as autonomous within their self-defined rule of the scientific field.
Development of individualized pragmatic strategies
What are the strategies for living through crises? What are the implications of these strategies for the maintenance of ignorance on unfunded research topics? The fact that they normalize the crises does not mean that scientists do not experience anxiety. However, scientists perceive their anxiety to be a result of their own inability to deal with changes, not a result of new commands from funding agencies. With their nurtured professional ethos, the responsibility for survival is highly individualized. The system of control is expected and taken-for-granted, and individual scientists are disposed to believe that their failure to comply with new research objectives is explained by their incompetency. Good scientists, at least in their ideal, should know how to be whatever kind of researcher is needed. Therefore, adopting individualized strategies, scientists merely struggle to survive, and do not challenge their ignorance.
Scientists develop a set of strategies in response to their individualized anxiety. A first strategy is to reserve their research samples and tools until they know better where to drive their research project. At the ABC, many scientists worked with biological samples, such as genetically mutated microbes, that are costly to prepare and used up quickly. Dr Hughes and I, for example, synthesized the DNA strand of a key set of mutated microbes in early 2017. It took three months of laborious work to mutate, amplify, and verify this set of samples. While preparing the samples, Dr Hughes and I sensed that the ABC was facing uncertainty and that the ABC leadership was intending to modify its research agenda. The impending crisis did not change the work routine, but the uncertainty of the future agenda made us hesitate in our plan. Initially, we were to test the degradation performance of this mutated microbe to find its potential as an enzyme to synthesize cellulosic ethanol. As we recognized that the center was targeting a non-ethanol product at this time, we decided to keep the sample in a freezer until the center declared the new agenda, because we did not want to waste the sample and the labor behind it on research that would not be appreciated by the organization. ‘I don’t know the best strategy right now. I’d rather put the gear in neutral’, Dr Hughes said.
A second strategy is a reorientation of the research to make it versatile, so that it will conform to future plans. Instead of persevering in their particular research methods and goals, scientists often adopt new approaches to the same data and material to make them broadly adaptable. Scientists often choose to train (or retrain) themselves to be versatile generalists, rather than a specialists in one technique that could be suddenly obsolete. Dr Collins, a post-doc, received his PhD in biochemistry; however, he was self-taught in bioinformatics. ‘I’ve been doing an old school biochem [project] for years, but I feel it’s time to move on. My goal is to be a data scientist. When I talked to [the PI], he just said, like, sounds good (laugh)’. He confidently predicted: ‘One day, as all scientists say, physical science and informatics will merge. Bioinformatics will be an umbrella term’. Unlike experimental techniques, bioinformatics is a general management skill for the big data of genetic molecules that can be applied to many diverse scientific projects. He used the data from his original project, which assessed chemical properties of target proteins from various cellulose samples, to self-teach programming languages (Python and C) and bioinformatics. ‘I am not trained as a programmer, and I don’t have the proper mentor in CS [computer science]. I am behind my peers, but still I am pushing this so hard because I know! I know that everybody will use bioinformatics. … Maybe, I should have tried harder to find a career there’. Dr Collins wore a headset all day long in the lab, and I found that he was often listening to a data science podcast. For him, bioinformatics training was survival training – a general methodological tool that ensured that he was never outdated.
Internalization of the embedded notion of ‘scientists in good standing’
Within the matrix of dispositions that comfortably accept economic pressure, individual survival strategies are not seen as opportunism, but as evidence of (and a prerequisite for) being a mature scientist. In other words, scientists retain their self-respect as good scientists amidst a normalized pressure. They don’t have to strategically portray their decisions to maintain self-respect – they are already good scientists within their internalized view of the scientific field as niche-driven and opportunistic. Individual strategies to cope with volatile funding crises don’t curtail the credibility of their science. Scientists remain sincere in both ignoring unfunded research topics and pursuing careers as scientists in good standing.
As scientists normalize external pressure and perceive ignorance as a necessary outcome of good science, they do not see their positions as strongly influenced by political and economic structures. It is difficult for scientists to recognize that they are, in fact, forced to move away from certain research topics. Scientists are secure in their belief that they are independent truth-seekers, entirely separate from the turmoil of the social world. Dr Joyce consistently insisted to me that I should not be ‘misled’ about what was happening in the ABC, saying that scientists at the ABC were never compromising their standard of good science. ‘We are driven by a deep curiosity. Our training sharpens us to conduct the elegantly designed scientific experiment. It’s a real absolute beauty. … I don’t care who rules the White House, because science is really just … a way of thinking’. Dr Hughes had a similar perspective and assured me that scientists were not forced to undermine the integrity of science. Rather, fluctuation was a healthy source of pressure for him: ‘I think it has given me a little more incentive to push myself, and I feel like I need to publish more. You know … that’s how the scientific community works’.
These researchers define characteristics of a good scientist in response to the social relations among funding agencies and the research organizations where they have developed, matured and survived throughout their careers. This institution of science not only governs which science projects are conducted, but also how the projects are conducted and abandoned. Scientists are comfortable ending projects that are not supported by funding agencies, because they see doing so as compatible with their idea of being a scientist in good standing in a niche-driven and meritocratic field.
The leaders’ table: Entrepreneur scientists and the legitimation of ignorance
Lab scientists’ dispositions cannot fully explain how the entire scientific organization makes sense of abrupt policy changes. Although lab scientists are deployed at the front line of experimentation, data production and analysis, their activities are inevitably tied to supervisors and higher organizational leaders who decide the organizational mission and even the lab scientists’ career paths. How do entrepreneur scientists in the higher positions of the organization perceive and make sense of controlling efforts from external worlds? How are their perceptions and commonsense beliefs related to the dispositions of lab scientists? How do they contribute to the organizational production of ignorance?
Enactment of cumulated history: ‘We’ve never been non-opportunistic’
An organization’s decision-making is an encounter between the habitus of its leaders and the objective circumstance that the organization faces. In this regard, when the ABC’s leaders put forth consistent efforts to comply with the funding agency’s guidelines, they are in line with the center’s cumulative experience of competing for its growth and survival. When the ABC was initially launched in 2008, the opportunity was not given freely. It was a result of strategic efforts by founding members of the organization, who shared a memory and experience of competition accompanied by a series of negotiations and risk taking. Dr Thompson, a director of the ABC since its establishment, had a chance to visit Washington, DC, to conduct a peer review for the DOE in early 2006. At that time, soon after the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was enacted, Dr Thompson realized that the DOE was set to announce a new FOA to found research centers for cellulosic biofuel production. Soon after returning to his home institution, he organized a group of scholars to apply for the funding. A team comprised of a fermentation scientist (the director himself), an agro-economist and a biochemist together wrote the initial funding application and, as expected, the FOA was announced by the DOE in August 2006. Dr Thompson recollected that he felt lucky to have had information about the incoming FOA because he knew what the DOE was looking for. ‘In order to be successful, you need to write a proposal that responds to these challenges. … We didn’t do that overnight. We’ve never been non-opportunistic’.
The 10 years since the establishment of the center have been an endless challenge for entrepreneur scientists seeking to maintain the organization. The center’s history has provided the necessary experience to cultivate the organizational capacity to react to the DOE, which conducted annual reviews. ‘We have changed drastically since the initial program launch, and we are still evolving’, Dr Carson, an associate director of the center, said in early 2017, when their new proposal was under review at the DOE.
For entrepreneur scientists, making changes in the research organization in response to external signals is a routinized task. Even before the radical shift in the FOA, entrepreneur scientists were always reacting to the funding agency’s needs. Accordingly, organizational structure, resource distribution, and human resource management have normally been contingent upon an agenda that was not the center’s own. For instance, Dr Thompson and the Science Advisory Board (SAB) members (consisting of industrial leaders, retired technocrats, and directors of other national laboratories) of the ABC routinely reviewed the center’s PIs and readjusted the distribution of funding. At the annual conference with other partner institutions, the ABC presented its featured research, which highlighted the trendiest topics. Depending on general research trends, the center recruited new PIs and withdrew old PIs. ‘There have been some bumps in the road. There are some people who on occasion feel left out when their name wasn’t on a paper and we’ve had to negotiate those. … There have been some people who started in the center and are no longer part of the center’, Dr Thompson said.
As shown in the ABC’s first opportunistic proposal, its having survived routine checkups, and its self-censorship, it is evident for entrepreneur scientists that social control is anything but new. Moreover, the very success of the center has been a history of strategic choices, often benefiting from entrepreneur scientists’ explicit efforts to make use of personal networks with political figures and technocrats, not avoiding external control, but using it as a chance to increase the likelihood that the center will receive government support. Given this history, a new FOA in 2016 and the consequent new application process were regarded as routine jobs for entrepreneur scientists.
Presentation of organizational legitimacy: Repertoires of merits and strategic ignorance
Scientists do not simply change and manipulate their research topics and data as routine bases for mere survival. They see the scientific field through the lens of meritocracy – the organized understanding of the rules of the scientific field as ultimately reducible to scientific merits. Although entrepreneur scientists’ job demands that they take advantage of political and economic opportunities, they believe that the success of the organization is attributable to its scientific research performance, which is measured by their publication and patent records, their consistent support in an evolving political landscape, and their interdisciplinary collaboration. This notion of meritocracy makes the idea that a funding agency is directly controlling the production of knowledge and ignorance incomprehensible to the scientists.
Entrepreneur scientists often treat their organization-wide publication and patent records as the ultimate evidence of their excellence and productivity. As a university-based center, scientists in managerial positions often legitimate the center’s role as a basic science facility, which can be most clearly shown in its publication record. In various settings, including public events, radio programs and interviews with me, the director presented the center’s publication and patent records. During a local radio program, Dr Thompson said that they had produced ‘more than 1,100 papers, 154 invention disclosures, 168 patents applications, 89 licenses, and five startup companies’. Dr Cole, one of the most productive PIs at the ABC, assured me that their performance was the best among all bioenergy research facilities in North America: ‘Science used to be more open, but not anymore. That is the reason why our miraculous publication productivity is so valuable – they are not a secret! So, it’s a basic science, not a dirty secret for a single industry’. As long as its publication and patent records remain high, entrepreneur scientists can maintain their belief that the center has no problems.
The center’s leaders believed that their ongoing success was evidence of the non-partisan quality of their work. The center was originally launched during the Bush administration and was supported throughout the Obama administration. During the renewal application process after Trump’s election, the entrepreneur scientists were confident, rather than worried. ‘There is evidence that this activity has got bipartisan support. It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House’, Dr Thompson assured me. Even when Trump said that he would close the EPA, PIs were not sincerely worried about the situation, saying: ‘You commonly hear that the White House budget is dead on arrival. I’ve heard that statement for 10 years. Independent of who’s in the White House, the White House budget never gets passed exactly the way that document arrives on the floor of Capitol Hill’. Their history of bipartisan support fostered scientists’ definition of the situation as meritocratic and independent.
Entrepreneurial scientists at the ABC treated its unique organizational condition – a cluster of research universities with various departments – as a taken-for-granted strength. Among all the DOE’s major bioenergy research facilities, the ABC was the only university-based research center, which provided it with organizational legitimacy as a center of interdisciplinary and ‘basic research’ – a term often used to occupy a strategic position to acquire more resources (Calvert, 2006). Dr Cole was recruited by the ABC in 2008 when he was a senior researcher in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). He often told his colleagues that he was ‘shocked at how open, how supportive, and how diverse the university is’. Dr Thompson echoed Dr Cole, commenting that competing facilities could not match the ABC’s level of interdisciplinary collaboration. The PIs I met at the center widely agreed that the DOE would maintain the ABC because of its particular specialty as a university-based cluster of interdisciplinary collaborators. One PI said: ‘This center has tried to bring people together and make it a place where collaboration, sort of, spontaneously happened, and some of those are freaking magic. Seriously’. The fact that various departments (biochemistry, bacteriology, agronomy, mechanical and chemical engineering, etc.) joined the center provided a strong mental safety net for organizational leaders.
Entrepreneur scientists could remain comfortable in the face of volatile political and economic changes because they defined the situation at the center as ultimately secured by their scientific excellence. The myriad compromises in its research agenda are not even seen as compromises, but as sincere readjustments to pursue better science. They measured their excellence by their large number of publications and patents, their history of bipartisan support, and their interdisciplinary structure. External control is less visible when the logic of meritocracy takes over as the basis of defining good science. Through the lens of meritocracy, entrepreneur scientists perceive the reconfiguration of their research not only as a routinized organizational management task, but also as a struggle to do better science. In their opinion, the center has survived, and will continue to survive, because of the meritocratic assessment of scientific excellence, not because of political opportunism. When political and economic signals are aligned with scientists’ logic of meritocratic science, scientists are sincere in their ignorance. This sincerity is ‘only possible – and effective – in the case of a perfect, immediate harmony between the expectations inscribed in the position occupied and the dispositions of the occupant’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 164). When entrepreneur scientists were struggling with the proposal for a new research agenda, they were not suppressed by the world of politics; rather, they were just doing better science, as they have always done.
Demarcation of deserving ignorance
When scientists adopt new research topics, old topics – ignored, yet perhaps still in high social demand – are demarcated as outdated projects that deserve to be ignored and are unworthy of scientists’ attention. This demarcating effort constitutes the everyday construction of ignorance, as ‘habitus plays its part in determining the things to be done, or not to be done’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 148). In the ABC, the cellulosic biofuel research, which was still in high demand in broader society, was quickly reframed as done science, as opposed to the promising new science that the DOE was seeking. The center perceived that it was shifting gears to the ‘next’ stage, rather than simply abandoning the field of cellulosic biofuels. During a local radio show, Dr Thompson exclaimed: ‘Change is exciting … change is good. Change means we’ve accomplished the missions that we started about 10 years ago’. Without exception, the PIs felt proud of their ‘changes’ and perceived that they were moving forward. In addition, the growth of cellulosic biofuel research in the private industrial sector was perceived as evidence that scientific innovation at the university level was already accomplished. ‘It’s not basic science anymore’, Dr Thompson assured me. However, he did not acknowledge the fact that the industrial growth of bio-based materials was more significant than that of biofuels. Industrial growth and external signals were considered and mobilized differently by the organizational leaders to legitimate their decisions about what to focus on and what to ignore.
Once ‘done science’ has been demarcated, entrepreneurial scientists reconfigure existing research units under the new umbrella of promising research projects. An excellent scientific organization has a vast repertoire of research capabilities. For entrepreneur scientists, a good scientific organization always cultivates its organizational capacity to be flexible in the face of any sort of unexpected shock from the outside. For example, when Dr Cole joined the ABC, the center’s leading agenda was the efficient production of cellulosic biofuels, whereas Dr Cole’s specialty was the genetic treatment of plants to make their chemical composition (called lignin) applicable to various uses. After several years of research on versatile lignin materials, Dr Cole’s research team is now being featured as one of the most representative leaders of the center. Dr Cole initially worried that his team was conducting somewhat spin-off studies that did not strongly resonate with other biofuel research groups. However, soon after the center went through its cycle of annual review, Dr Cole realized that it was striving to broaden its public support by cultivating a diverse image. During press meetings, the center wanted to be seen as an economically productive group; for the general public, it presented its research on health risk minimization in energy production; to university administrators, the center had to prove its strength in patent-filings; and to the funding agency, it had to be always ready to show that it could conduct innovative research on whatever topic the agency was interested in. ‘Mine was sort of the backdoor of the center’, Dr Cole said. ‘I did what I could do, and the center, gracefully, picked them later. Who could possibly know that?’
Dr Cole was not the only PI who thought that their research projects were often tangential to the center’s claimed research focus. Multiple PIs agreed that such breadth of coverage helped the center renew its funding by strategically realigning to the new requirements of the FOA. Ignorance, a strategic evasion of a particular research topic, is considered an organizational capability. Unacknowledged, but widespread, agreement on (and actual use of) the strategic deployment of the center’s diverse activities captures the ongoing cultivation of the organizational culture of not only the strategic usage of what they have, but also a strategic evasion of what the funding agency is no longer interested in supporting.
The logic of meritocracy legitimates the center’s choice to abandon cellulosic biofuel research as rational and strategic decision in the search for more scientifically valuable research topics. From the deepest part of his heart, Dr Cole told me: ‘The DOE allows you to continue doing the research because you actually do firmly believe you’re doing something quite good, and you have the potential to do it further or better or whatever’. In other words, entrepreneur scientists widely adapted the view that the projects they had been doing for last 10 years were no longer a promising source of scientific discovery. ‘Basically, cellulosic biofuel innovation is already done’, announced Dr Thompson.
In sum, entrepreneur scientists at the ABC cultivate a logic of meritocratic science that legitimates the organizational evasion of unfunded scientific research topics. When external monitoring is routinized, entrepreneur scientists share the common sense that organizational survival is the ultimate mission. Yet that survival is perceived to be a consequence of the center’s objective productivity, not as a mere product of opportunism. In response to evolving external pressures, entrepreneurial scientists strategically mobilize diverse research projects to ensure the center’s ongoing support, and these shifts are praised, rather than stigmatized.
Discussion
My ethnographic research revealed a habitus of ignorance among scientists in the ABC. The habitus of ignorance is a cultivated collective disposition among scientists that legitimates the demarcation of socially undoable research topics from promising research topics. It normalizes external directions while comfortably disregarding unfundable research topics. Scientists value ignorance as much as the knowledge they produce – it is a means of survival and professional development. Scientists who have passed the rites of the institution of science become veterans who internalize the professional ethos of science as niche-driven and opportunistic. Under the political and economic pressure that forces scientists to modify their research topics, different actors within the organization produce ignorance as part of a cycle of habitual acceptance and legitimation of ignorance; therefore, scientific organizations become chambers for the production of ignorance. Mediated by habitus, ignorance is self-perpetuated as part of the internal logic of science, and therefore becomes invisible to the scientists – the very perpetuators themselves – who follow that logic. In the case of the ABC, the result was the abandonment of alternative energy technology.
Understanding ignorance through the lens of habitus brings several useful insights. First, conceptually, it exemplifies how Bourdieusian sociology can be used in both organizational studies and STS. In organizational studies, habitus has not been widely applied, although the concepts of field and capital were foundational concepts of new institutionalism (DiMaggio, 1979; DiMaggio and Powell, 1991; Emirbayer and Johnson, 2008; Meyer and Rowan, 1977). I outlined how applying a Bourdieusian concept of habitus can be useful in an analysis of organizational actors’ behaviors. STS scholars have recently emphasized the usefulness of Bourdieu in highlighting power dynamics and the inequality of cultural capital in the scientific field (Albert and Kleinman, 2011; Baker, 2017; Gauchat, 2011; Gauchat and Andrews, 2018; Hess, 2011; Panofsky, 2011); however, Bourdieu’s own sketch about the scientific field as ultimately rational and truth-seeking has faced severe criticisms in STS and beyond (Camic, 2011; Gieryn, 2006; Gingras, 2006; Sismondo, 2011). By incorporating habitus in the analysis of the scientific field, this paper suggests how Bourdieusian sociology can, in fact, underline self-perpetuating power dynamics in the scientific field that normalize and reproduce structural inequalities.
Second, this study highlights that power is exercised not only through coercion, but also through a manufactured consent – scientists’ habitual actions are well aligned with the interests of political and economic power. The relationship between the political and economic fields and the scientific field cannot fully be understood by the number of projects discarded or the amount of resource deduced. I reveal that a mechanism of political and economic domination of science is fulfilled by the systems of a survival-oriented research institution that cultivate a habitual subjugation of scientists. Mediated by habitus, the domination becomes ‘both spontaneous and extorted’, and ‘this submission is … itself the effect of a power’ (Bourdieu, 2000: 171). This indirect mechanism of influence resembles a ‘new means of manipulation’ by dominant social groups in modern society. As Bourdieu (1984: 154) writes: the emergence of this new petite bourgeoisie … can itself be understood only in terms of changes in the mode of domination, which, substituting seduction for repression, public relations for policing, advertising for authority, the velvet glove for the iron fist, pursues the symbolic integration of the dominated classes by imposing needs rather than inculcating norms.
A social production of ignorance involves scientists’ voluntary choices based on their internalized rules of the game in the scientific field, which are nurtured throughout their careers within the scientific field that is intertwined with political and economic power. Such a process does not resemble the idea of direct coercion and violent oppression (the iron fist). Instead, the indirect containment of the scientific field through the long-term construction of the habitus of ignorance (the velvet glove) perpetuates a form of a permeated social control over science that is self-governed by the un-orchestrated orchestra of scientists’ practices (Bourdieu, 1990, 1991). The result is a systematic development of scientists’ and scientific organizations’ voluntary subjugation to political and economic domination without them perceiving it as such.
Finally, the case of the ABC shows how institutional pressures can create or contribute to a culture of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is generally seen as an ideology that praises free competition and meritocracy, through an atmosphere in which individualized merit-based competition is the rule. Surviving organizations and their projects are perceived as superior, and the cost of their survival is unchallenged and easily forgotten. In the case of ABC, in order for the hands of political and economic power to become invisible, the scientists involved must perceive only merit-based competition as the driving force. If influences from the world of power and economy, and the consequential production of ignorance, are unrecognized and unchallenged, scientists become a more powerful apparatus of money and politics, and the reflexive moral economy of knowledge is systematically diminished. Although this research is based on the single case of a national laboratory, it calls for a deeper understanding of the subjugating agency of scientific institutions, the mechanisms of the production of ignorance, and strategies for challenging these forces.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank Mustafa Emirbayer, Daniel Kleinman, and Michael Bell for their tireless guidance and support. Robert Freeland, Saul Halfon, David Hess, and Kelly Joyce provided feedback to the earlier draft. Also, I am grateful to Miriam Barcus, Christopher Holmes, Won-Tak Joo, Youbin Kang, Jungmyung Kim, and Jaclyn Wypler. Editors and the anonymous reviewers gave outstanding suggestions.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and the Crowe Scholarship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
