This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant in the Social Studies of Science, Engineering, and Technology will help fund a historical and ethnographic study of the science of elite sport. Elite in this case means professional or world-class. Behind every world champion athlete are scores of scientists studying his or her performance. These scientists produce knowledge about how human bodies work, about what bodies are natural versus performance-enhanced, and about the determinants of human performance. Exercise scientists bring elite athletes to their laboratories--and their labs to the athletes. They create the experimental conditions to produce knowledge about the limits and potential of human performance. The dissertation tracks the rise of exercise science (from about the 1920's to present) and the global networks through which exercise science flows today. NSF dissertation improvement funds will be used to support the study of the daily production of knowledge in exercise science. Fieldwork will take place at the laboratory of a world-renowned exercise scientist and at the laboratory and field site of the International Center for East African Running Science. Because exercise science is a transnational network of expertise, the study is itself multi-sited, located in South Africa, Kenya, and Scotland. Participant-observation, direct systematic observation of behavior, and semi-structured interviews address three specific aims: 1) to document factors that affect the development and enactment of science experiments on human performance, 2) to develop a list of specific practices or techniques of knowing that constitute exercise science research, and 3) to document interactions and communications between researchers and human subjects. The intellectual merit of this study is that it contributes to understanding the everyday practices of human sciences. This study considers the extent to which the insights developed from the ethnographic study of sciences that address non-human objects can be applied to the study of a science in which the subjects are human beings. Documenting experiments as they unfold over time in both the laboratories and at elite athlete training camps, findings will suggest ways in which the roles of scientist and subject, of observation and embodied knowledge, interact and overlap. The broader impact of the research is that it engages with an important and growing scientific field. As world championship competitions bring global culture into living rooms, bars, and tea shops around the world, so, too, do they bring the science that has developed historically in parallel with elite sport. Yet the development, practice, and impact of exercise science are not well understood. The dissertation will describe how researchers decide upon which aspects of human performance to privilege, on the material and human contingencies that inform their work, and on the position of exercise science within a broader network of scientific and athletic expertise. The research will illuminate how the global context of elite sport affects experimental practice and how scientific practices circulate in the global context of elite sport.
