Contribution short abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with how we as ethnographers might understand and articulate longing in biomedical science, centring affect in laboratory practice, and in the ways we imagine what science is or could be.

Contribution long abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with how we as ethnographers might understand and articulate longing in biomedical science. Scientific writing is a particularly precise genre which gives the retrospective impression of a highly methodical approach, omitting extraneous details, affective orientations, and experimental failures. But scientific practice is constantly shifting in response to its own successes and failures, to political and commercial interests, to technological capabilities, and to the expertise and interests of its practitioners. In this way, researchers are constantly building and rebuidling possible futures, driven in part by their own desires.

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted with research scientists investigating Huntington’s disease – a debilitating and fatal hereditary neurodegenerative disease, for which there currently exists no treatment or cure. Significantly, many Huntginton’s researchers come from affected families, and/or are at-risk or gene-positive themselves. Because of this, researchers are not only academically interested but highly emotionally invested in research. With constant experimental failure (from small lab experiments to large clinical trials), researchers have to continuously shift their practice and expectations while managing their affective attachment to the work. This creates a complex entanglement of hope, grief, disappointment, suffering, excitement, and longing.

I am therefore interested in two things. One, conceptualising the affective labour of scientific practice as a potential site of longing, requiring both a pragmatic creativity and a general orientation toward hopefulness. And two, asking how anthropologists can (or fail to) responsibly and faithfully articulate the longing(s) of others.