Paper short abstract:

The paper compares the patterns of production and maintenance of science-based knowledge in two organizational settings - Narim Selection Station and Kolpashevo Airport in Western Siberia. It outlines the evolution of these patterns during the USSR and their evolution in post-soviet period.

Paper long abstract:

The paper compares the patterns of science-based knowledge in two different organizational settings - Narim Selection Station and Kolpashevo Airport in Western Siberia. It outlines the establishment and maintenance of these patterns during the decades of USSR and post-soviet period. Applying a modified version of actor-network theory (Tchalakov 2014), it considers the knowledge production through the categories of persistence and endurance of human actors in the heterogeneous scientific and engineering (micro)communities. In particular it considers 1) the establishment of Kolpashevo Airport and the small local airfields attached to it, and 2) the Narim Selection Station as a 'forms of life", where the science-based knowledge is produced, maintained and transmitted in the local communities, thus interacting and transforming their adherent everyday knowledge. In the first case it traces the types of (science-based) knowledge that mediated the smooth functioning of the set of local (village) airfields affiliated to the Kolpashevo airport - engineering, radio-communications and navigation, meteorology and how they became part of the everyday life of local communities. Similarly, it outlines how the unique science practices in creating new varieties of crops suitable for artic climate have been embedded in the local practices of Soviet and post-sovied farming and became part of their everyday life. The importance of the preservation of the organizational context of knowledge production and maintenance is pointed out, evidenced by the differences in the evolution of the two knowledge context after the closure of Kolpashevo Airport early this century and continuous existence of Narim selection station.