The Making of Scientific Knowledge: Sensory and Bodily Practices in Field Biology (Science Studies)

What does really happen between the moment when a scientist is observing a bird in the wild and publishing a scientific chart? Jana Thierfelder reveals the hidden life of field science through the 30-year archive of biologist Michael Griesser’s work with Siberian jays in Sweden. Blending design, anthropology, and science studies, it uncovers the sketches, notes, tools, and sensory practices behind scientific knowledge. By tracing how scientific observation becomes publication, it shows that science is not just objective output – but lived, embodied, and relational work. It is about the people, places, and processes that shape knowledge. A call for more open, transdisciplinary approaches to how we understand and share science.

Jana Thierfelder, born in 1987, is a designer and anthropologist whose work bridges the arts and sciences. She has taught in the fields of ethnography, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and New Materialisms at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste and Universität Bern. She has also coordinated several interdisciplinary projects that foster dialogue and collaboration between artistic and scientific communities. Her research draws on feminist and anthropological approaches to STS, with a focus on the sensory, bodily, material and institutional conditions under which knowledge is produced in the (natural) sciences.