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Short abstract:

A team of disciplinarily diverse social scientists play multiple roles of researcher, leader, and mentor focusing on the Rubin Observatory’s LSST. We will share the complexity/‘messiness’ of our multi-layered positionality and how it contributes to transforming scientific communities with dialogue.

Long abstract:

In 2021, we—a team of disciplinarily diverse social scientists—were invited by the LSST Discovery Alliance (LSST-DA) to participate in the development of privately-funded postdoctoral fellowships that focus on the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The LSST project aims to produce an unprecedented 10-year long high-definition video of the night sky, and is expected to produce ground-breaking discoveries about the universe. Uniquely, fellowships were awarded to both astronomers and junior scholars in the social science and humanities.

In our collaboration with astronomers, we social scientists came to take on multiple, overlapping roles. We serve on the Steering Committee with influence over processes for selecting fellows, as members of the Fellows’ mentoring committees, and also as research grant recipients of the LSST Discovery Alliance who are pursuing our own research about the LSST community and astrophysics more broadly.

We hope to share the complexity and ‘messiness’ of our multi-layered positionality as social scientists studying relationships via examples involving research, leadership, and mentoring within a scientific community. We also want to raise pressing questions and hope to learn from discussion with others. How do we interpret and frame our research findings given our own influence over our phenomenon of study? How do we decide when to intervene and when to observe? How do we ethically navigate asymmetrical relationships with individuals who simultaneously may not only be research subjects but also be mentees or researchers?