Abstract
Exercise physiology has been reflecting and reconfiguring science and sport for over a century. Since the late nineteenth century, physiologists have investigated “exercising” motions, like running, walking, and bicycling, in both laboratory and field studies. Because these scientists move between their labs and what they consider “the field,” including spaces of athletic training and competition, exercise physiology offers an exciting case to answer questions relevant to both Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Sport Studies: How do exercise physiologists transform sporting spaces into sites of scientific experiment? How are competing athletes enrolled as research subjects, and how do they experience the research encounter? Do scientists consider the knowledge produced about human physiology in sporting spaces more or less “real” than their laboratory-generated data? Drawing from seven months of transnational ethnographic research, this chapter follows physiologists within and between their labs and their fields. Ethnographic data suggest that, in contrast to inhabiting a rather dramatic role in the laboratory, exercise physiologists manufacture their own invisibility in the field—such that athletes may not sense they are subjects of scientific research. The chapter illustrates how exercise physiologists manufacture this “invisibility” through two distinct mechanisms, one social and the other technical.
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Notes
- 1.
All names have been changed to preserve the anonymity of the scientists and their research subjects. Faces in images have been obscured for the same reason.
- 2.
Only the phases of exercise physiology research that involve human subjects have this quality of being “dramatic.” There are different kinds of exercise physiology research. As mentioned, some exercise physiologists work with animal models, others with human subjects. My own fieldwork only involved documenting the research practices of physiologists who work with human subjects. While all exercise physiologists are concerned in some way with elucidating physiological mechanisms, exercise physiologists also work at different and overlapping scales, from the molecule to the “performance.” Here I am describing the phases of laboratory and field studies of exercise physiologists during which the scientists were “capturing” the performances of human subjects. After the trials, when the same physiologists analyzed the parts of their subjects, for example, blood samples, muscle biopsies, or saliva, their work practices were not “dramatic.”
- 3.
To be clear, here, I am not concerned with and not contrasting the ways the physiologists write about their research and communicate “aperspectival objectivity” to their peers. Rather, I am contrasting how laboratory and field studies unfold over real time.
- 4.
Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physiological studies of running or cycling might have been called “the physiology of exercise,” “work physiology,” and/or “industrial physiology.”
- 5.
Sport historians have been studying physiologists’ contributions to the histories of physical education and sports medicine for decades, for example, Berryman (1995, 2010), Berryman and Park (1992), Delheye (2014), Heggie (2010, 2011), Hoberman (1992), Park (2007, 2011, 2012), and Wrynn (2010). The role of exercise physiology or exercise/sport science in the history of science is less well-established, but growing, for example, Heggie (2013, 2016a, b), Henne (2015), Kasperowski (2009), Johnson (2013b, 2015), Oakes (2015), Scheffler (2011, 2015), Svensson (2013), and Tracy (2012). Massengale and Swanson (1997) and Tipton (ed.) (2011, 2014) provide practitioner histories of exercise and sport science.
- 6.
Heggie (2016a) points out that what or who constitutes “well-trained” athletes—and whether physiologists implicitly or explicitly consider such folks “normal”—is historically contingent. “Athletes” (by twenty-first-century standards of physical activity) may have in fact been the unmarked “invisible participants of scientific work” in much of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physiological research (p. 187).
- 7.
- 8.
Beyond describing the social heterogeneity of field research during the data-acquisition, or what physiologists would call the “testing,” phase, other STS scholars document how field scientists interact with non-scientists before and after gathering data, taking up issues of funding and controversy, respectively. See Kuklick (2011), Oreskes (2003), and Bonneuil et al. (2008, pp. 217–223).
- 9.
I distributed ethics in my fieldwork, too. After Kara’s meeting with the race medical director, I introduced myself, explained my research, and asked if it was okay if I took notes and photographs. He said it was fine, but that if I took photographs, either they had to be wide panoramic, anonymous shots or I needed to ask permission from individual runners to do a close-up. He explained those were his instructions to the camera crews as well.
- 10.
They had noted a plateau in the results after a certain speed that the subject ran, whereas the results should continue to rise. They had talked to other research groups, and other scientists had had similar problems working with the K4 outside, but, in the mid-2000s, no one had published these results. The K4 had been advertised to exercise scientists as a mobile instrument capable of bringing the precision of the lab to the field, while the validation studies of the K4 were performed in the lab (against other devices or techniques for measuring gas exchange), not the field.
- 11.
On the Cold War pressure for NASA to develop telemetric tracking devices, see Benson (2010).
- 12.
Describing the history of the standardization of sporting spaces is outside the scope of this chapter but crucial to the construction of the sporting competitions as “field” sites. See Bale (1994), Bale and Vertinsky (2004), and Guttmann (1978), and see Heggie (2016a) for more on the historical relationship between modern sport and modern science.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the scientists, physicians, and subjects who permitted me to enter the laboratory—and field!—with them and to observe their work. I am particularly grateful to “Kara,” who gave helpful feedback on previous versions of this chapter, as did Rob Kohler, Mary Mitchell, Taylor Dysart, and Jon Johnson. Thank you to Mary McDonald and Jennifer Sterling for organizing the 4S panel, editing this book, and helping to bring the worlds of Science and Technology Studies and Sport Studies together. I am also extraordinarily grateful for the way they pushed me to clarify the argument and writing in this chapter. A Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Research Grant from the National Science Foundation and a Helfand Graduate Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Health helped support the research.
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Johnson, A. (2020). Manufacturing Invisibility in “the Field”: Distributed Ethics, Wearable Technologies, and the Case of Exercise Physiology. In: Sterling, J., McDonald, M. (eds) Sports, Society, and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_3
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