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they navigated people pushing prams (strollers), walking dogs, and cycling. Andrew smiled when those same passersby paused to stare at Neil, who looked as though he wore a jet pack (Fig. 1). Neil was to run 6.2 miles (10 km) in the park, three times around a route previously mapped out by Andrew. Two researchers on bicycles would accompany Neil, their task to guide him through the course and, Andrew only half- joked, to protect Neil from delinquent teenagers. Contemplating the dogs, babies, wind, and slick surfaces, one member of the team antici- pated a crash.
Neil ran the first two loops of the course without event. Then, as he turned a tight downhill corner to enter some botanical gardens, Neil slipped. The fall looked serious, but Neil got up quickly and, unable to talk because of the face mask, gave a slight wave to signal he was okay. As Neil emerged from the last loop of the course, the research team cheered him into the finish, immediately removed his face mask, and rushed the sweat-drenched Neil back to the lab before he became too cold. Once inside, they detached the rest of the equipment, downloaded the data, and began reading the graphs generated by software programs. Exercise physiologists plot the individual data points generated by their instru-
Fig. 1 Left: An exercise physiology field trial. Right: Subject wears the K4, core temperature pack, accelerometer, and GPS. A researcher puts on the face mask (Photos by A. Johnson)
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ments and rely upon “the graphical method” to represent physiological data (y-axis) over time (x-axis) (Brain 2015; Brain and Wise 1994;
Hankins 1999). Crestfallen, Andrew explained to Neil that he would have to repeat this trial another day because, at x = 20 minutes, the curve of the oxygen consumption data “plummeted” in a way that suggested instrument error.
Cold, wind, pedestrians, dogs, prams, fear of falls, falls, extra batteries, data loss … field studies, many scientists contend, are messy. To do sci- ence out in the world, away from the comfort and control of the labora- tory, is, at best, hard; at worst, intellectually unreliable or physically dangerous. However, physiologists have regularly conducted field studies, including studies in far more extreme environments than this urban park, for over a century (Heggie 2013; Tracy 2012).
Drawing upon ethnographic data, this chapter follows exercise physi- ologists within and between the lab and “the field.” In the mid-2000s, I spent seven months at three world-renowned exercise physiology “human performance” laboratories in South Africa, the UK, and the US. I lived near the laboratories, observed the daily routines of and talked informally to the scientists, took notes and photographs, and conducted 63 semi- structured, open-ended interviews with scientists and technicians. While employing standard techniques from “lab studies” (Dumit 2004; Knorr- Cetina 1999; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Traweek 1992), this research was not confined to the lab. I followed scientists within and between the lab and what they labeled “the field,” documenting scientific practices, including scientist-subject relations. The sites of the field studies I wit- nessed were diverse, from spaces of athletic training (like the urban park described above or training camps for distance runners in the North Rift of Kenya) to spaces of racing (like the Comrades Marathon in South Africa).
In this chapter, I ask whether the practices of exercise physiology field studies differ from those of their lab studies, and, if so, how? I privilege the exercise physiologists’ designations of which studies constituted “field studies” and “lab studies” and then my own observations as to what prac- tices unified or differentiated their field from their lab. I pay particular attention to relationships between the scientists and their athlete- subjects.
I argue that, in contrast to inhabiting a rather visible, palpable role in the
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laboratory, exercise physiologists manufacture their own invisibility in the field—to the point that athletes may not even sense that they are sub- jects of scientific research.2
Describing exercise physiologists’ fieldwork as the “manufacturing of invisibility,” I am repurposing an analytic from Science and Technology Studies (STS), that of “invisible labor.” Most accounts of “invisible labor”
in STS point toward work done by people who receive little to no credit for that work, either from the scientific community or from those of us who write the history or sociology of science and technology (Bangham and Kaplan 2016). These “invisible” laborers include different kinds of
“erased” research subjects (Stark 2016); technicians, assistants, or other
“hidden helpers” (who may themselves conduct and write up most or even all of an experiment or study) (von Oertzen 2016); and disempow- ered scientists (e.g., many twentieth-century women scientists) (Oreskes 1996; Shapin 1989). In this framing, where there is “invisible labor,”
social and political hierarchies are at play, and gender is a clear theme (Kohlstedt 2016). In their introduction to a recent volume on “invisible labor” Jenny Bangham and Judith Kaplan summarize this meaning of
“invisibility” as follows: “For these authors invisibility connotes a lack of recognition or credit, so that the social and political marginalization of certain people and processes pose barriers to understanding how science operates” (Bangham and Kaplan 2016, p. 4). “Invisibility,” then, in some STS scholarship, suggests a status—a vulnerable, oppressed, or exploited status—ascribed to and embodied by a person.
A different meaning of “invisible labor” emerges from this ethno- graphic account of exercise physiology laboratory and field studies.
“Invisibility” here connotes not a form of work ascribed to and embodied by a person on a lower rung of a social or political hierarchy but rather as a form of scientific practice strategically desired and deployed by scien- tists. The claim that scientists may actually desire their own “invisibility”
is not novel. Following Lorraine Daston’s (1992) account of the rise of
“aperspectival objectivity” in nineteenth-century sciences, STS scholars have described how nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideals of scientific
“objectivity” involve a “detached” scientist who aims to minimize indi- vidual impact on experiment—and to write about research as such. With the rise of “aperspectival objectivity,” natural scientists began avoiding the
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first-person “I,” for example (Daston 1992). So it is not surprising that exercise physiologists may adopt practices that help them achieve “invis- ibility”—being inconsequential, unnoticeable, without any individual impact on the study—because that invisibility may enhance their credi- bility as “objective” researchers.3 Three things about exercise physiolo- gists’ strategically deployed “invisible labor” are surprising, though. First, place matters. It is not in the lab, but in the field that exercise physiolo- gists manufacture their own invisibility, in doing so reinforcing their own justifications that their field research, fraught and messy as those studies may be, captures phenomena even “more real” than in the lab. Second, to whom the scientists become invisible in the field matters (Star and Strauss 1999). The exercise physiologists become invisible to their athlete- subjects. Third, contrary to the scientists’ characterizations of field sites as
“more real” than the lab, that is, as places imagined as untouched or uncontrolled by scientists, exercise physiologists extend a great deal of effort to manufacture their own invisibility in the field. Documenting that effort is the goal of this chapter.
In the rest of this chapter, I first establish exercise physiology as an interesting case for both Sport Studies and STS scholars. Two sections then describe the exercise physiology lab and field, respectively, providing a backdrop for the argument to come. As I will show, in the “human performance laboratory,” exercise physiologists unabashedly saturate tri- als with their own presence, with their hands-on, eyes-on, voices-on prac- tices. In contrast, in “the field,” the same exercise physiologists become
“invisible” to their athlete-subjects; the scientist-subject relationship appears to dissolve. I then illustrate just how exercise physiologists manu- facture their own invisibility in the field through two mechanisms, one ethical and the other technical. First, by taking advantage of the social heterogeneity of field sites, exercise physiologists distribute the ethical responsibility for their subjects’ safety and consent. Second, by miniatur- izing instruments, exercise physiologists study their subjects from a dis- tance. The conclusion engages with recent Sport Studies and STS conversations about “wearable technologies” to consider the broader bio- political implications of manufactured invisibility in exercise physiology field research.
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