Velvet revolutions: Accounting for epistemic and political change at a modern physics laboratory amid the second rise of biology in synchrotron science

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a modern physics laboratory that seeks to understand the relationship between technical knowledge claims and political modes of authority and control. It is argued that groups within the laboratory are engaged in ‘epistemic politics’ whereby technical knowledge claims are used to justify modes of authority, access, and control in the lab while at the same time these modes of authority, access, and control are implicated in the presentation and reception of technical knowledge claims. Through an analysis of three different episodes, an understanding of change in scientific practice emerges whereby trends in wider culture and transformations of the epistemic political order at the lab are seen as linked. In particular, changing orchestrations of epistemic politics at the lab are seen as both mediating and promoting the rise of biology in synchrotron science at the end of the twentieth century.