Partially connected to science : the Luxembourg Museum of Natural History and its scientific collaborators.

This thesis explores the production of scientific knowledge at the Luxembourg Museum of Natural History. It focuses in particular upon the roles and interrelationships of amateurs and professionals in this process. In doing so it explores how the boundaries of science are made and unmade.
As a contribution to the science studies literature, the production of science is examined in a rather unexplored space: a museum. Theoretically, this thesis draws on science studies in general and actor-network theory in particular. Based on empirical research - participant-observation fieldwork, semi-structured interviews and document analysis - it unpacks the 'cultural boundaries of science'. It provides an empirical and theoretical understanding of the multiplicities, heterogeneities and materialities of boundaries and boundary-work.
On the one hand, this thesis shows how the co-production of scientific knowledge and the making of a 'museum without walls' is rendered difficult through resistive agency and different articulations of space and time; on the other, it examines how this co-production is eased through the managing of boundary encounters and boundary objects, and practices such as decentralisation, brokering, and heterogeneous gift exchange. This thesis thus provides an informed account on what it means to be 'partially connected' to science.