Dissertation Research : Knowledge in Motion: Science and Elite Sport in a Global Context

在科学、工程和技术的社会学研究中，这项科学和社会论文改进拨款将帮助资助一项关于精英体育科学的历史和民族志研究。在这里，精英的意思是专业的或世界级的。在每一位世界冠军运动员的背后，都有数十名科学家在研究他或她的表现。这些科学家创造了关于人体如何工作的知识，关于哪些身体是自然的而不是增强的，以及关于人类表现的决定因素。运动科学家将精英运动员带到他们的实验室--他们的实验室带给运动员。他们创造了实验条件，以产生关于人类表现的极限和潜力的知识。论文追踪了运动科学的兴起(大约从20世纪20年代的S到现在)，以及运动科学今天通过的全球网络。NSF学位论文改进基金将用于支持运动科学中日常知识生产的研究。田野工作将在一位世界知名运动科学家的实验室和国际东非跑步科学中心的实验室和现场进行。由于运动科学是一个跨国的专业网络，这项研究本身就是多地点的，分布在南非、肯尼亚和苏格兰。参与者观察、直接系统的行为观察和半结构化访谈解决了三个具体目标：1)记录影响人类行为科学实验发展和实施的因素；2)制定构成运动科学研究的具体实践或技术清单；3)记录研究人员和人类受试者之间的互动和交流。这项研究的学术价值在于，它有助于理解人文科学的日常实践。这项研究考虑了从涉及非人类对象的科学的人种学研究中发展出来的洞察力在多大程度上可以应用于以人类为主体的科学研究。随着时间的推移，在实验室和精英运动员训练营开展的实验将被记录下来，研究结果将提出科学家和受试者、观察和具体知识的作用相互作用和重叠的方式。这项研究的更广泛影响是，它涉及到一个重要的、不断增长的科学领域。随着世界锦标赛将全球文化带入世界各地的客厅、酒吧和茶馆，它们也带来了历史上与精英运动平行发展的科学。然而，运动科学的发展、实践和影响还没有被很好地理解。这篇论文将描述研究人员如何决定给予人类表现哪些方面的特权，决定影响他们工作的物质和人类偶然性，以及运动科学在更广泛的科学和运动专业知识网络中的地位。这项研究将阐明精英体育的全球背景如何影响实验实践，以及科学实践如何在精英体育的全球背景下循环。

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Social Studies of Science, Engineering, and Technology will help fund a historical and ethnographic study of the science of elite sport. Elite in this case means professional or world-class. Behind every world champion athlete are scores of scientists studying his or her performance. These scientists produce knowledge about how human bodies work, about what bodies are natural versus performance-enhanced, and about the determinants of human performance. Exercise scientists bring elite athletes to their laboratories--and their labs to the athletes. They create the experimental conditions to produce knowledge about the limits and potential of human performance. The dissertation tracks the rise of exercise science (from about the 1920's to present) and the global networks through which exercise science flows today. NSF dissertation improvement funds will be used to support the study of the daily production of knowledge in exercise science. Fieldwork will take place at the laboratory of a world-renowned exercise scientist and at the laboratory and field site of the International Center for East African Running Science. Because exercise science is a transnational network of expertise, the study is itself multi-sited, located in South Africa, Kenya, and Scotland. Participant-observation, direct systematic observation of behavior, and semi-structured interviews address three specific aims: 1) to document factors that affect the development and enactment of science experiments on human performance, 2) to develop a list of specific practices or techniques of knowing that constitute exercise science research, and 3) to document interactions and communications between researchers and human subjects. The intellectual merit of this study is that it contributes to understanding the everyday practices of human sciences. This study considers the extent to which the insights developed from the ethnographic study of sciences that address non-human objects can be applied to the study of a science in which the subjects are human beings. Documenting experiments as they unfold over time in both the laboratories and at elite athlete training camps, findings will suggest ways in which the roles of scientist and subject, of observation and embodied knowledge, interact and overlap. The broader impact of the research is that it engages with an important and growing scientific field. As world championship competitions bring global culture into living rooms, bars, and tea shops around the world, so, too, do they bring the science that has developed historically in parallel with elite sport. Yet the development, practice, and impact of exercise science are not well understood. The dissertation will describe how researchers decide upon which aspects of human performance to privilege, on the material and human contingencies that inform their work, and on the position of exercise science within a broader network of scientific and athletic expertise. The research will illuminate how the global context of elite sport affects experimental practice and how scientific practices circulate in the global context of elite sport.