1 Emotions in Scientific Work: Toward a Research Agenda on Emotional Cultures in Science

Academic work has undergone profound transformation through the restructuring of university careers, the formalization of research excellence criteria, and the rising expectation that science should address urgent societal challenges. These contemporary transformations have reshaped not only how researchers conceptualize their work, but also how they experience, and emotionally engage with, their professional roles and environments. In response, research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) has begun to explore how emotions are inextricably interwoven into scientific practice — from the selection of research topics (Parker & Hackett, 2014), to undertaking fieldwork in challenging conditions (Lorimer, 2008), and navigating the complexities of interdisciplinary collaborations (Boix Mansilla et al., 2016). Scholars have demonstrated the essential role of emotions in shaping research work and career trajectories in academia (Bloch, 2016), inviting further inquiry into how emotions intersect with the broader reorganization of academic life.

From the outset, STS have acknowledged the importance of emotions in scientific life and rejected the Cartesian ideal of a strictly objective and impersonal science, which states that all types of emotional influence should be excluded (Fleck, 1935; Merton, 1973). Yet the study of the emotional lives of scientists has developed slowly and at the margins of the field, often in isolation and without much coordination (Parker & Hackett, 2014; Barbalet, 2002). This slow progress may be attributed to enduring epistemological and methodological divides in the social sciences, where emotions have traditionally been relegated to psychology and treated as individual reactions rather than socially mediated experiences. In STS, the development of a study of emotions has also been hindered by a tendency to oppose emotions and discourse, especially among early advocates of laboratory studies, who have, paradoxically, constantly deconstructed modern dualisms in the study of social life (Wetherell, 2013). Although emotional processes unquestionably involve bodily experiences, every researcher who has empirically studied the role of emotions in academic life has observed that emotions are typically expressed discursively (Bloch, 2016). As shown by the sociology of emotions, this discursive aspect reflects both the largely subjective, intimate character of emotional experience and the fact that emotions often develop slowly over time rather than erupting in an immediate response to events. Additionally, expressions of emotions are strongly regulated by social norms and conventions, which prescribe what can be publicly shown (Hochschild, 1983). Recent research has, therefore, attempted to move beyond the simplistic dual opposition between emotions and discourse, instead exploring how emotions can be analyzed through diverse empirical materials and close examination of the contexts and meanings of emotional expression (Lamont, 2009; Müller & Kenney, 2014; Brunet, 2024). Drawing on the emergent agenda of studying emotions in STS, we build on our existing work to explore how emotions are collectively organized and shaped by norms, social structures, and power relations in academic life, leading to the formation of specific academic selves (Anderson, 2017; Bloch, 2016; Müller, 2014a).

To investigate the emotional influence of contemporary transformations in research, we bring together the previous works conducted by both authors. In particular, we advance the concept of emotional cultures to examine how emotions are organized, regulated, and experienced in academic life. Rather than considering emotions as purely individual experiences, we focus on how emotional experiences are produced on a collective level through interactions between individuals, including across geographical distances and between people who have never met, and through institutional norms and values (Anderson, 2017; Von Scheve & Salmella, 2014). Common examples of collective emotions include perceptions of living in an “age of anxiety” (Wilkinson, 2001) or the pervasive fear of environmental apocalypse (Swyngedouw, 2010), both of which are often linked to precarious working conditions and the overly productivist logics of late neoliberal capitalist societies (Rosa, 2003). Previously, authors have employed various concepts to capture these collective emotions — for instance, by examining how affective atmospheres shape the contemporary experience of academic mobility (Davies, 2021). These studies suggest that collective emotions can become dominant patterns for organizing emotional life and can take the form of enduring and long-lasting affective conditions.

While concepts of an “age of” particular emotions often risk homogenizing emotional experiences across specific periods of time (Anderson, 2017), the concept of emotional cultures highlights the coexistence of multiple, overlapping modes of experiencing collective emotions. With this conceptualization, we do not aim to reify emotional cultures by categorizing a set of universal, pre-identified emotional states. Instead, we use this concept to illustrate how emotions dynamically shape and are shaped by the situations and structures of academic life. The concept of emotional culture builds on previous works that have emphasized the collective organization of emotions in social communities through the shared (de)valuation of specific emotional states (Rosenwein, 2006) and through social norms regulating emotional life (Hochschild, 1983). However, unlike perspectives that assume individuals belong to clearly defined emotional communities, we argue that researchers constantly navigate a variety of emotional cultures, whether by juggling diverse professional activities or by occupying various professional roles over their careers. In this sense, our conceptualization echoes the influential STS idea that different epistemic cultures coexist and organize scientific life (Knorr-Cetina, 1999). Specifically, we propose that academic life is experienced and shaped through diverse emotional cultures, which in turn influence the type of work conducted by researchers.

The concept of emotional cultures does not necessarily imply that collective emotions are simply taken for granted, passively accepted, or externally imposed on social actors. On the contrary, as the sociology of emotions has extensively shown, emotions are actively managed, engineered toward particular ends, and carefully regulated by individuals to align their emotional experience with social expectations (Hochschild, 1983). Individuals engage in “emotional work” to regulate their emotional experience in their professional life, guided by a set of “feeling rules” that act as scripts for the acceptable experience and expression of emotions (ibidem). Sociologist Charlotte Bloch (2016) has conducted foundational work on this topic by exploring the tacit mechanisms of emotional regulation across various academic activities and career stages. Bloch’s research shows that emotions organize academic life through a rich and diverse emotional culture, which foregrounds moral interpretations of academic work. Building on Bloch’s work, we extend the concept of emotional cultures by integrating perspectives from STS with recent research on collective emotions. This allows us to explore the epistemic consequences of multiple, coexisting emotional cultures in academia. In that regard, our analysis of academic emotional cultures not only contributes to existing STS scholarship on the role of emotions in academia (Parker & Hackett, 2014; Lorimer, 2008; Boix Mansilla et al., 2016; Brunet et al., 2019; Schönbauer, 2024), but particularly draws on the central STS insight that scientific knowledge and the social world are co-constitutive and mutually shape one another. As captured by Jasanoff’s idiom of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), emotions serve as both conditions and outcomes of academic work: they influence the choice of research agendas and practices, while also being shaped by institutional contexts and disciplinary norms. This mutual shaping of epistemic and social orders is intrinsically emotional. It leads researchers to cultivate different emotions concerning how they relate to their work, which then gradually stabilize as shared emotional cultures. Far from being neutral, these emotional cultures reflect moral evaluations about what counts as good and bad science, and what qualifies as a desirable academic self.

This article builds on our previous research, conducted both individually and collaboratively, to examine how contemporary transformations in academia have fostered distinct emotional cultures, which shape how scientists experience and relate to their work. Adopting a multi-sited inquiry approach (Marcus, 1995), we analyze several cases to explore how emotional cultures are co-produced in diverse institutional and epistemic settings. Specifically, we focus on three distinct but interrelated cases, each explored in the sections that follow: (2) the working conditions and career trajectories of young researchers in the life sciences; (3) the development of societally relevant research topics in response to the ecological crisis in the ecological sciences; and (4) the implementation of new funding and evaluation frameworks in European research funding agencies. We selected these cases because they exemplify demands for productivity and societal relevance in contemporary research, while also crystallizing important debates about research assessment. Building on these cases, we draw on previously published analyses of a rich and diverse dataset collected during earlier studies, including semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and institutional documents — all analyzed qualitatively through iterative coding processes. Although each case provides distinct insights into different aspects of knowledge production (scientific careers, epistemic work, and governance practices), they now enable us to transversally compare how emotions are collectively experienced, cultivated, and contested in diverse academic situations.

While the material has been the focus of former analysis, we revisit our previous publications here by using the concept of emotional culture as a sensitizing concept (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), allowing us to investigate how emotions intersect with academic norms, institutional expectations, and epistemic practices in different situations. Through this comparative lens, we suggest that different career stages, scientific topics, and research institutions may foster similar collective emotional experiences among researchers. Our identification of different emotional cultures is not intended to be exhaustive, nor do we claim to have identified all major emotional cultures in contemporary science. Rather, our exploratory and comparative approach underlines the importance of attending to emotional cultures as organizing scientific life and invites future works to further investigate the role of emotional cultures. We conclude by highlighting the potential of the concept of emotional cultures to illuminate contemporary transformations in academic life.

2 Emotional Culture of Precarious Scientific Careers Among Young Researchers in the Life Sciences

In recent decades, academic working conditions have been profoundly transformed by the adoption of market-oriented New Public Management techniques. These reforms have promoted the use of quantitative performance metrics, intensified evaluation practices, and framed competition as a key driver of academic excellence (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). As a result, funding structures have been reorganized around short-term, project-based models, and performance has been increasingly assessed through indicators focused on publication numbers and grant acquisitions. Over the past twenty years, research in STS and neighboring fields has begun to explore the broader impact of these transformations on academic work, including their emotional dimensions. Contributing to this emerging research agenda, Müller (2014a & 2014b) draws on semi-structured interviews with 38 Austrian postdoc researchers in the life sciences¹ to trace how intensified competition, short-term contracts, and overall uncertainty about long-term career prospects shape researchers’ emotional experiences. Müller shows that these conditions foster living and working with a sense of “anticipatory acceleration” and “latent individualization”, as researchers strive to meet different expectations.

The intense competition for scarce tenured positions, combined with early-career precarity, can be analyzed as fostering an emotional culture of anxiety among postdoctoral researchers. Today’s postdocs face significant job insecurity and must compete with a growing number of peers. In response, many extend their working hours, aiming to publish at a higher rate and in more prestigious journals than their predecessors, creating “a climate of constant rush and fear of lagging behind, as outcomes of a research process are hardly calculable from the beginning” (Müller, 2014b, p. 338). This leads postdocs to work in a state of “anticipatory acceleration”. This term denotes that:

Postdocs accelerate their working practices, i.e., increase the amount of events per time, to their very limits not primarily because of concrete and time pressures (e.g., a person somewhere else in the world working on exactly the same topic; a specific deadline), but habitually and because of a profound anticipatory orientation that suggests that however much they are currently doing might not be enough and can still be optimized (Müller, 2014a, para. 33).

Evaluation criteria for hiring and promotion in contemporary academia emphasize a high number of countable academic outputs, such as publication numbers and grant money. Importantly, it is not only the overall number that counts, but also the number of countable units per unit of time. During the postdoctoral period in the life sciences, the ratio of impact factor per time is particularly crucial for career advancement — i.e., how many publications a researcher produces, and at what journal impact factors, within a given period. This focus on publication metrics encourages postdocs to adopt future-oriented subjectivities, where “the present is governed, at almost every scale, as if the future is what matters most” (Adams et al., 2009, p. 248). This fosters an emotional culture characterized by feelings of constant acceleration, anxiety, and, inevitably, exhaustion and vulnerability. The quote below from a postdoc is illustrative of this emotional state:

“You need to keep publishing papers, you need to publish, you need to make sure you publish papers over a year. If you don’t have papers over a year, then you are toast. […] I need at least one, two papers a year […] or a really good one every few years” [PDF_2m 1058] (Müller, 2014a, para. 27).

Working in a state of anticipatory acceleration affects postdocs’ epistemic choices. For example, postdocs tend to opt for topics with fairly predictable outcomes and those that seem likely to provide them with regular publications, rather than pursuing questions that appear most intellectually or socially relevant to them but might be riskier, more unorthodox, or time-consuming. Some postdocs choose to pursue both risky and safe projects at the same time. Whatever the strategy, the postdoc period is characterized by deep-seated anxieties about the future — both in professional terms and in more existential ones. Postdocs often fear that they might become long-term unemployed and be relegated to the margins of society if they fail in their academic careers, while others worry that the mental health impact of their current work life might, at some point, overwhelm and crush them. These existential anxieties and career pressures are amplified by a professional socialization that prioritizes the academic career path above other career possibilities.

Living in a state of anticipatory acceleration, postdocs often begin to enact a state of latent individualization when it comes to their professional social relations. The notion of “latent individualization”

tries to capture how postdocs’ decision-making practices within their current institutions and groups are also almost always crucially shaped by considerations of and for a future self that is no longer part of their current collective contexts (Müller, 2014a, para. 35).

Relations with colleagues, groups, and institutions are often rendered instrumental and tentative, as any attachments in the present are perceived to require constant evaluation regarding the advantages and disadvantages they might bring for the future self who competes to stay in science. This puts a strain on collegial relations and collective environments, and particularly impacts the ways in which postdocs engage in teaching and mentoring, as these activities are seen as work that does not easily create transferable currency for academic career-making (Müller, 2014b).

Taken together, anticipatory acceleration and latent individualization often lead life science postdocs to question why, and for whose benefit, they are even doing research, creating feelings of dissatisfaction and lack of purpose. This is particularly troubling in a field like the life sciences which holds such promise to benefit society. Furthermore, career precarity affects life choices, such as family planning and long-term commitments, which might further reinforce postdocs’ isolation and anxiety.

An emotional culture of anxiety emerges from the precarious scientific trajectories of young researchers in the life sciences. Yet, this anxiety is not only generated by the contemporary organization of the research system; it also affects how researchers relate to their topics of study and how they conceive the impact of their research in addressing pressing societal challenges. In the following section, we turn to a second emotional culture of eco-anxiety, which is shared among researchers in ecology. Although the cases of postdocs in the life sciences and researchers in ecology differ in focus, they both point to similar emotional cultures of anxiety shaping contemporary research work.

3 Emotional Culture of Eco-Anxiety among Ecological Scientists Engaged in Societally Relevant Research

In many research fields, the expectation to address urgent societal challenges has become deeply ingrained in researchers’ practices, reflecting a fundamental change in the pursuit of contemporary academic work (Brunet et al., 2025). A particularly illustrative example is the field of ecological sciences, which investigates the interactions between species and their ecosystems and has extensively documented the profound impacts of human activity on the environment. Paradoxically, despite the magnitude of ecological degradation, few authors have examined how ecological scientists emotionally engage with the dramatic findings they produce. Drawing on more than 50 semi-structured interviews with ecological scientists and ethnographies of their work in both laboratory and field settings, Brunet (2020 & 2024) has argued that an emotional culture of eco-anxiety pervades the work of ecological scientists.² However, ecologists do not experience this anxiety passively as a source of despair or discouragement. Instead, they actively respond to it in their work by making specific choices about which research they consider worth pursuing. In contrast to the previous case of life science postdocs, whose emotional experiences are shaped by the pressures of a fast-paced, productivity-driven academic system, this second case highlights how emotions can become particularly intensified when researchers feel compelled to intervene in the world surrounding their research.

In their research practices, ecological scientists are at the forefront of environmental changes, meticulously accumulating evidence of ecosystem transformations and species loss (Granjou & Arpin, 2015). While their findings often call for urgent and transformative action, many ecologists feel unable to galvanize the societal response required to confront what they frequently describe as a large-scale biodiversity extinction crisis, which threatens the conditions for humans’ survival. The emotional culture of their work can be described as eco-anxiety, a combined experience of deep worry about an impending ecological catastrophe and a sense of helplessness in the face of insufficient societal action (Brunet, 2020). This emotional culture is historically rooted in early narratives of environmental loss, such as Rachel Carson’s dystopian vision of a Silent Spring (1962) devastated by pesticides, and is continually reinforced by contemporary global scientific assessments, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) climate reports and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) warnings about the potential extinction of a million species. The following quote illustrates this emotion of eco-anxiety, conveyed not only through the sense of powerlessness expressed by the interviewee but also through fragmented speech marked by repetitions and physical gestures:

“I think that […] the stakes are just too enormous; the issues are too complex. We’re dealing with a […] a big problem [bangs on the table], a big problem [continues banging throughout], and it’s that people have a hard time imagining and picturing what would happen if this or that were gone in the ecosystems (interview with a restoration ecologist, Brunet, 2020).

Although eco-anxiety appears to be a widely shared emotional condition among ecological scientists, it is experienced in varied ways, depending on researchers’ specific epistemic practices and their views about how knowledge should contribute to societal change. As a multifaceted discipline composed of various subfields, ecological sciences offer differing emotional resources for coping with the emotional culture of eco-anxiety, that is inevitably experienced by researchers working on ecological changes. To illustrate how distinct branches of ecology provide contrasting resources for managing this emotional culture, Brunet (2020) identified three major orientations, without presuming they are exhaustive, nor denying the existence of more nuanced positions among researchers. First, restoration ecologists can manage their eco-anxiety by experimenting with ways to rehabilitate ecosystems damaged by human activity. They emphasize the resilience and unpredictability of ecosystems, showing that ecological recovery is eventful and uncertain. Rather than mourning the loss of species and habitats, these researchers tend to adopt a more optimistic attitude and recommend accepting the destruction of natural areas and acknowledging the potential value of the novel ecosystems created through restoration actions. In contrast, a second group of functional ecologists often rely on advanced computer modeling to simulate ecosystem dynamics. Many collaborate with ecological economists, who share similar system-oriented epistemic practices, to analyze how ecosystem functioning can be valued in economic terms. Through their work, these ecologists can channel their eco-anxiety into a hopeful, solution-oriented approach — one that frames ecosystems as essential for economic development while demonstrating their importance for the functioning of human societies. A third group of ecologists, often trained in taxonomic sciences, or closely collaborating with social scientists, and sometimes publishing in sociology and philosophy journals, remain more deeply immersed in their eco-anxiety. These ecologists criticize the technical solutions promoted by the other groups, viewing them as insufficient or even complicit in exacerbating the dynamics driving ecological collapse. These three ways of responding to the culture of eco-anxiety illustrate that different fields within ecological sciences do not offer the same resources for managing it. Instead, specific epistemic practices give rise to distinct modes of “experiencing eco-anxiety” (Brunet, 2020), revealing potential affective inequalities within the same discipline.

By focusing on a specific environmental metric used by ecologists to quantify the economic benefits of ecosystems, Brunet (2024) has detailed how some ecologists attempt to turn their eco-anxiety into hope in response to the ecological crisis. In the case of France’s Port-Cros National Park, ecologists measured the services provided by the park’s ecosystems, such as carbon storage and recreational opportunities, as a way to foster a more positive emotional culture around nature conservation. Rather than evoking the sadness and fear typically associated with traditional ecological metrics, such as the number of species lost, the valuation of ecosystem services emphasized the park’s positive contributions to human well-being. According to the park’s report, each euro invested in the park generated 92 euros in local economic returns. This use of ecosystem services metrics by ecologists can be compared to the concept of transposition in music theory, where a sad minor tone can be turned into a joyful major sound. Similarly, valuing ecosystem services enabled ecologists to transpose the emotional undertones of conservation from a burdensome and discouraging task into a hopeful and exciting endeavor (Brunet, 2024). Port-Cros’ ecologists intended to reconfigure the prevailing emotional culture of eco-anxiety, fueled by unstoppable environmental degradation and the park’s shrinking budget, into a hopeful justification for continued funding and an enthusiastic message demonstrating the park’s value to local decision-makers. This emotional reframing also served to distance ecologists from the “killjoys” stereotype often projected onto conservationists who oppose development projects (Ahmed, 2010). However, despite these efforts, the emotional transposition proved largely unsuccessful in securing support for the park’s expansion, as decision-makers requested tangible investments rather than speculative calculations and expressed distrust toward scientific studies.

An emotional culture of eco-anxiety pervades ecological research, where it is not simply internalized or passively accepted but actively renegotiated by ecologists. Many researchers develop strategies to promote more positive emotional politics in nature conservation, which tend to celebrate positive emotions while sidelining negative ones (Braidotti, 2006). Advocates of ecomodernism are particularly supportive of this kind of emotional work, emphasizing optimism and faith in technological innovation to address ecological challenges (Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2007). Other emotional cultures in contemporary academic life are also rarely monolithic; they consist of complex interplays between positive and negative emotional experiences. In the next section, we examine the emotional cultures that emerge through research funding and evaluation. These cultures are shaped by hype and excitement, yet they also require emotional restraint and often generate fatigue, disillusionment, and frustration among researchers.

4 Emotional Culture of Hype and Restraint in Research Funding and Evaluation Activities

As one of the most illustrative examples of contemporary transformations in academic work, research funding has become a central site in researchers’ emotional lives. In the following section, we explore how funding agencies both shape and are shaped by a specific emotional culture, using two successive examples. Continuing with the case of ecological research, we first show that an emotional culture of hype and opportunism informs researchers’ practices when applying for funding. We then turn to the peer-review process, where a contrasting emotional culture of excitement and restraint emerges as a way to navigate the values underpinning research evaluation.

5 Conclusion

How do emotions make knowledge? Our analysis reveals the critical role that emotional cultures play in diverse academic practices today. In a time marked by precarious scientific careers and urgent environmental challenges, the concept of emotional cultures allows us to examine how shared emotional norms and practices shape the professional experiences of researchers. By focusing on emotional cultures, we shift the analysis beyond individual feelings to explore how collective emotional experiences are produced by current academic working conditions. Our approach draws attention to how emotions are not simply private or irrational experiences but socially patterned forces that influence how knowledge is produced, circulated, and evaluated in scientific communities. Emotional cultures provide researchers with repertoires for interpreting their experiences, whether of hope, anxiety, frustration, or enthusiasm, and thus become central to how scientists orient themselves in their professional environments. Importantly, our analysis of emotional cultures in contemporary academia demonstrates that emotions have epistemic effects, profoundly influencing the type of research that scientists pursue and that reviewers find worthy of funding. Researchers live and work in epistemic cultures that are fundamentally emotional, whether they are precarious postdocs balancing the risks of their projects, ecological scientists driven by the promises of novel solutions to the ecological crisis, or reviewers managing both excitement and boredom through cultures of emotional restraint. These cultures shape not only what kinds of questions are seen as valuable but also what types of researchers are perceived as competent and accepted by their peers. Far from being peripheral to research practices, emotions thus function as tacit governance tools to regulate academic life.

Although emotional cultures may seem invisible or distant, they play an essential role in governing researchers’ work and fostering the emergence of specific academic selves. These selves can manifest in the commitment to particular ecological research agendas or in the relentless desire to continuously publish and sustain career trajectories. Through emotional cultures, researchers learn what kinds of ambitions and frustrations are considered acceptable, and which ones must be concealed or reframed. The everyday labor of becoming a successful academic, therefore, involves not only intellectual work but also the emotional alignment with norms that are often specific to field and role. These include enthusiasm to engage with fundable topics, resistance to anxiety in the face of uncertain career trajectories, and humility in moments of peer review. Emotional cultures do not only shape what scientists do, but also who they wish to become. However, it is important to acknowledge that these emotional cultures are not imposed passively on researchers. Researchers actively enact them by exploring different strategies to manage their emotions and by defining tacit rules that prescribe how researchers should feel, particularly when confronting negative emotions in their work, such as anxiety and boredom. Although largely unspoken, these feeling rules are also constantly reinterpreted in different settings, from grant writing and peer review to fieldwork and career-making. Being a researcher thus demands intense emotional management, as individuals navigate multiple roles and responsibilities while living with a constant sense of crisis, whether in research or ecological contexts. In that sense, studying emotional cultures opens spaces for criticism and care toward contemporary academic practices. By reflecting on emotional management strategies and renegotiating emotional norms, researchers can challenge dominant modes of valuation or reject ingrained academic practices that are harmful to the production of responsible academic selves.

By shedding light on emotional cultures in academia, we hope that our analysis can contribute to developing a lively research agenda in STS and beyond on how emotions shape and are shaped by transforming cultures in science. Understanding the emotional dimension of academic life is essential not only for grasping the current organization of knowledge production, but also for imagining other academic futures. Such alternative emotional cultures of research could better support emotional well-being, confidence in the pursuit of academic careers, personal, under-hyped, curiosity-driven projects, and renewed care for the world we study and the colleagues we work with.