‘Sensing Infrastructures’: A spatial examination of soft power, the neutrino particle and underground fundamental physics laboratories

Abstract

This practice-based PhD project examines the complex implications of soft power within the field of fundamental science. The research studies what is often referred to as ‘science of peace’ through the transnational political treaties and the material infrastructures and architectures of the network of deep underground laboratories that have been developed across the globe for the exploration of fundamental physics. These complex sites constitute what I term sensing infrastructures. These networks amplify new political and material interactions, offering a multiscalar, entangled organism of scientists, particles, liquids, data, politics and technologies. Furthermore, I contend that these sites work together for the production of knowledge and aim to unveil their social, political and territorial impacts on local, regional, national and global levels.

Informed by feminist technoscience studies and spatial and visual practices, and via the production of films made with footage produced in part through fieldtrips, this PhD aims to demonstrate the ambivalence of scientific neutrality via an examination of the neutrino particle as a critical concept. Through this process, the neutrino is used to rethink the notion of neutrality – an idea challenged by the neutrino’s own dynamic existence in different and coexisting quantum states, oscillating as it propagates through space. Barely interacting with matter, the neutrino also becomes an anomaly for the standard model of particle physics that proposes an ambiguous spatial and material condition of the neutral. This indeterminacy opens up critical and speculative possibilities about matter and allows reformulations of concepts such as neutral and neutrality.

This doctoral project offers an alternative conceptualisation of both scientific neutrality and the neutrino particle. The research contributes to techno-feminist new materialism, to philosophies of science, and posthumanism concerning the need to reframe our understanding of matter in order to improve tools for talking back to science and contributing to public knowledge.

Date of Award	26 Sept 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Fiona Crisp (Supervisor) & Andrea Phillips (Supervisor)