Paper short abstract:

The role of funding in the making of communities in science is understudied. I explore some of the ways through which funding at a European level makes community in synthetic biology and put a particular focus on scale, homogeneity and temporality.

Paper long abstract:

Communities as social units have been a topic of considerable theoretical interest within STS. The emergence of such communities, however, has been the object of far less investigation. Likewise, the importance of shifts in funding practices in knowledge production has been well established, but the ways in which funding arrangements and scientific communities are entangled remain understudied. In this paper I contribute to closing those gaps through investigating the role of research funding at a European level in establishing particular communities in synthetic biology. I do so by drawing on an empirical study of a collaborative project funded under the European Union's FP7, which proposes to use synthetic biology for the production of a microbial biofuel.

I link the increasingly instrumental role for science as an economic driver in the European Union with changes to funding patterns; and trace how that role bleeds into the work programme and the funding scheme under which the project was supported. In particular, I argue that the funding scheme's constraints prescribe bigness as a way of working; and explore the ways in which the focus on tangible outcomes exacerbates the heterogeneity of the community, promoting an assemblage that does not neatly fit along epistemic and ontologic divides.

I contend that this heterogeneity, coupled with the idiosyncrasies of project-based funding renders such communities temporally fragile; but that communities do not unfold without leaving epistemic and material residues in the (potentially multiple) communities they may dissolve into.