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Short abstract

How do “scientific outposts” shape infrastructural temporality — and does waiting itself become a mode of governing from the margins? Drawing on the ANR SciOUTPOST project, and combining archival research and interviews, this paper compares French research infrastructures located in remote places.

Long abstract

Research infrastructures are often equated with large, costly, and centralized facilities — yet many operate in remote, resource-constrained environments where resilience is a daily concern shaped by discontinuous maintenance, seasonal interruptions, and prolonged waiting. This tension between top-down institutionalization and bottom-up articulation of research practices constitutes the core problematic of this contribution. How do scientific outposts (Dumoulin Kervran et al., 2024) intertwined with colonial histories, governance, and power structures shape infrastructural temporality from the margins?

Since the 1970s–80s, physics and astronomy have relied on internationally networked facilities in the most remote places on earth, producing interoperable data and shared research cultures. The National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) progressively extended this infrastructure-based governance — through the Very Big Research Infrastructure (TGIR) Committee in 1988 and the Institute of Ecology and Environment (INEE) in the 2010s — to environmental and ecological sciences. Yet managing heterogeneous outposts in remote environments generates persistent tensions between standardized frameworks and locally situated knowledge, where waiting for logistics, weather windows, or funding cycles is constitutive of scientific practice.

Drawing on the ANR SciOUTPOST project, and combining archival research and interviews, this paper compares French scientific outposts’ research infrastructures — EPOS-France volcanology observatory in the Reunion, the ESO, the Concordia Antarctica base, tropical stations in French Polynesia and French Guiana, and EMSO-France Azores seabed observatory. It examines how waiting, maintenance, and standardization shape resilience and knowledge circulation, and identifies material, epistemic, geopolitical and social conditions enabling more decentralized practices at the edges of the research infrastructure landscape.