We present our results in four subsections: (1) configurations of the research groups, (2) the roles and responsibilities of the engineering researchers, (3) characterization of the research center as a community of practice, and (4) authentic engineering practices. The center did not resemble the research laboratories described in prior ethnographic studies in terms of physical space however, it is an organizational system that demonstrates various dimensions of human activity. Participant observations, field notes, and interviews were conducted. We employed ethnographic data collection strategies to document the process of developing expertise (i.e., learning) and meaningfully contributing (i.e., research) at the center. We explored the cultural characteristics of an interdisciplinary engineering research center and documented how its members interacted and sustained both research and learning activities.
However, how learning and research are sustained in engineering research laboratories at the graduate level requires further investigation. Laboratory studies explore the norms and characteristics of scientific practice and explain the constructive nature of knowledge production. The study’s principal finding is that through dynamic collaborations and frequent communication, the SQuInT quantum information physicists have created and continue to sustain a remarkably robust and intuitively coherent social structure that validates Wenger’s model of a community of practice in the stewardship phase. In so doing, the study considers some of the effects that commitment, gender, and power differentials have on the work, on the production and use of social space, and on the creation of community. The study examines functional and cultural aspects of quantum physics work, including its workspaces, work, tools, language, and forms of discourse.
Based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork among quantum information physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and professors and students affiliated with the Southwest Quantum Information and Technology (SQuInT) Research Network, the study seeks to join current conversations in the anthropology of work, community studies, and the social studies of science concerning the role of collaboration and scientific discourse in quantum physics and the ways in which certain forms of community are constituted and sustained in scientific work.
This study explores the entangled nature of collaboration and communication in a quantum physics community of practice.
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