In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

This paper examines the tensions and paradoxes that arise during the life course of research groups as they strive to establish and maintain an identity, acquire and retain control of an ensemble of research technologies, and evaluate and choose the risks they are willing to accept in their work. My central aim is to rekindle interest in the ambivalences, tensions, and paradoxes of science by identifying and illustrating the tensions that characterize research groups. Among the questions of concern are: How does a group establish an independent identity while remaining connected with its field of research? How are consistency of focus and continuity of approach balanced against the freedom younger scientists need to develop as independent investigators? What varieties of risks are encountered in research and how are they evaluated and navigated? Based on intensive, repeated, face-to-face interviews with scientists at various levels of seniority at elite private and public universities, the paper examines the choices leaders make at these critical junctures and the consequences of those choices. Several sorts of tensions are examined, including autocracy versus democracy, varieties of risk, role conflicts, openness versus secrecy, competitive cooperation, ambivalences about priority claims, and balancing continuity and change, and their implications for science, scientists, and the research process are discussed.

Emotions are essential but little understood components of research; they catalyze and sustain creative scientific work and fuel the scientific and intellectual social movements (SIMs) that propel scientific change. Adopting a micro-sociological focus, we examine how emotions shape two intellectual processes central to all scientific work: conceiving creative ideas and managing skepticism. We illustrate these processes through a longitudinal study of the Resilience Alliance, a tightly networked coherent group collaborating at the center of a burgeoning scientific social movement in the environmental sciences. We show how emotions structured and were structured by the group’s growth and development, and how socio-emotive processes facilitated the rapid production of highly creative science and helped overcome skepticism by outsiders. Hot spots and hot moments—that is, brief but intense periods of collaboration undertaken in remote and isolated settings—fueled the group’s scientific performance and drove the SIM. Paradoxically, however, the same socio-emotive processes that ignited and sustained creative scientific research also made skepticism more likely to occur and more difficult to manage. Similarly, emotions and social bonding were essential for the group’s growth and development, but increased size and diversity have the potential to erode the affective culture that generated initial successes.

This study investigates the relationship between social connections and collective civic action. Measuring social capital in eight Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhoods allowed the authors to determine that individuals with strong social bonding (i.e., association and trust among neighbors) are more likely to take civic action. However, while social capital lessens the relationship between an individual’s social status and the likelihood of taking action, it does not eliminate the positive relationship. The analysis also suggests that bonding and bridging are distinct forms of social capital that have some different antecedents