Working with curiosity: Knowledge transfer practitioners’ ambivalence at CERN[Between Relevance and Excellence? Research Impact Agenda and the Production of Policy Knowledge]

Current science-policy trends emphasise efficiency, application orientation, and accountability. This article is inspired by the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012; the author studies how the knowledge transfer practitioners at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the birthplace of the Higgs boson, account for their experiences at CERN. In the body of the Science Policy Studies literature, the knowledge transfer practitioners’ perspective on the wider impacts of particle and high-energy physics research is relatively understudied. The data are generated from qualitative interviews. Constructivist discourse analysis, which is introduced from Science and Technology Studies, is applied to the data; namely, this research focuses on the practitioners’ worldview and their perceived situation at CERN. As a result, there is a repetitive sense of ambivalence towards knowledge transfer in the discourse. Practical suggestions are provided in response to this ambivalence.