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- Convenors:
-
Simone Abram
(Durham University)
Maja Hojer Bruun (Aarhus University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Great Hall
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Experiments are often designed with a view to transforming something in the world. Some kinds of experiment are more ‘worldly’ than others, engaging people in their everyday lives or accessing areas of common property, knowledge or culture. What kind of experiments are, for example, Living Labs? Do they exploit knowledge commons, appropriate hope of change, or reproduce existing notions of user-driven innovation and/or experimental science?
Long Abstract:
Anthropology has a long history of skirting around the notion of experimenting, and long standing ambivalences about the goal of change for the better versus the risk of unwanted consequences from ‘interference’ in social life. Recently, the notion of living labs, and other 'user-centric' research methodologies for prototyping and scenario-building in so-called real life settings, have become more popular in research, product and service development and in policy contexts. This has entailed calls for more anthropological input, broader participation, and use of ethnographic methods. Such calls rely on a concept of transformation through experimentation entailing assumptions about the generation of knowledge, the value of lived experience, future imaginaries and the role of common knowledge.
What does it imply to frame a city, community or environment as a laboratory or testbed for emerging technologies and ideas? Especially where this might be among vulnerable parts of the population and/or in the Global South, after long histories of exploitation. Who takes the role of designing experiments with ambitions to be transformative, whether design sprint, living lab, hacking events, intentional communities or settlements? What role do participants have in 'citizen science' and for what or whose benefit?
On the other hand, what potential for collaborative learning and common knowledge may there be and how can such potential be unfolded? How can anthropologists, with the discipline's long standing tension between field and lab, approach these methodologies? What epistemological and ontological challenges do we encounter in such collaborations?
This panel invites conventional and unconventional contributions in a panel format.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the Shared Knowledges Workshops, a living lab for social innovation in Québec rural communities. Putting together researchers and local actors, these workshops focus on co-learning and the reflexivity at work in local communities.
Paper long abstract:
Living labs are most often organizational devices aimed at testing technological innovations in concrete situations before they are put on the market. This communication presents a different kind of living lab aimed at promoting the emergence of social innovations. The "Shared Knowledge Workshops" are a dispositif that seeks to understand the conditions for setting up innovative practices in rural Québec communities and to promote their transfer. These workshops focus on co-learning and the reflexivity at work in local communities. They have gone through three phases since 2012, each posing particular organizational and epistemological problems. This paper will present the ways this sharing of knowledges was organized at each of these stages and what were (and are) the innovative practices supporting this circulation of ideas.
The Workshops involve university researchers affiliated with the Center for Research on Social Innovations and local actors. They also involve national organizations whose mission is to disseminate the best practices and ensure their transfer. These participants meet on the basis of their experiences, their skills and their different missions. Each of these participants has their own sources and ways of legitimizing their knowledge. A primary difficulty is therefore to establish a concrete dialogue between these categories of actors; this involves interpersonal dimensions, but also political and epistemological ones. The fundamental challenge is to establish modalities of "association" (Latour) allowing the circulation of discourses and influencing their reception
Paper short abstract:
From an urban development perspective this paper presents what might be gained when local informal communities are understood as self-driven laboratories of various kinds of problem-handling and solution-model development.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents initial work arriving when local informal communities are understood as self-driven laboratories of various kinds of problem-handling and solution-model development.
Coming from the anthropological tradition of understanding local common knowledge and informal practices as resourceful models of problem-solution that are important and valuable to the sustainability of local lives, the paper initially argues that local communities have always been self-driven laboratories of problem-handling. However, they have not been recognized as such and consequently their models of problem solution have largely been overlooked.
Based in the local context of social housing estates in Denmark the paper exemplifies how these contain unimagined resources of social and environmental problem-handling developed informally by the communities over time. What this local problem-handling amounts to are often socially and environmentally sophisticated solution-models to urban problems which are fully developed but most often invisible to actors of e.g. urban planning due to the informal and sometimes dubious legal character of the models.
Through a concrete example of the very cleaver yet partly illegal garbage handling model at a Danish social housing estate the paper exemplifies what might be gained by recognizing local informal communities as self-driven labs of problem-solving and model development.
The paper speculates if the local informal solution-models can be collected, and used in other local or global contexts in developing urban solution-models to solve social and environmental problems arising from intensified urbanity now and in the future.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines proposals for an Energy Transition Zone in Aberdeen and activists’ responses to it as contrasting but interrelated experiments situated at the energy transition’s periphery. We explore a propositional politics that exceeds efforts at spatial, legal, and temporal enclosure.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the transformation of Aberdeen, the self-declared oil capital of Europe, against the backdrop of an unfolding energy transition and a global climate crisis. Specifically, we examine the ambivalent responses to plans for an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) situated adjacent to Aberdeen’s South Harbour expansion, the St. Fittick’s Park nature reserve, and the working-class neighbourhood of Torry. Backed by major Scottish and UK government funding and by what activists describe as a web of local corporate and political influence, the ETZ invokes future imaginaries of ‘green recovery’ and ‘just transition’, undergirded by expert forecasts and innovative low-carbon technologies. By contrast, its opponents – including Friends of St. Fittick’s Park, arts practitioners, and their allies – highlight how the ETZ will damage the wellbeing of the area’s human and non-human locals. They write letters and Facebook posts, organise events, use smartphone videos, songs, and greeting cards, and elicit stories and photos from residents and sympathisers to document and archive the park’s daily life and ecology. Their activities are inflected by personal biographies, experiences of environmental injustice, and debates over whether to campaign for community asset transfer or to resist the ETZ altogether. We take the ETZ and activists’ actions as contrasting but interrelated sets of experiments situated at the energy transition’s periphery. While the ETZ is proposed as testbed for novel techno-material and commercial opportunities, the activists’ responses query this effort at spatial, legal, and temporal enclosure (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022) with a propositional politics that exceed its bounds.
Paper short abstract:
A global drive towards experimentation and 'citizen scientists' as participants is turning cities into 'living labs' or 'test-beds'. The paper explores notions of laboratory and experiment at play in such endeavours and asks what kinds of experimental thinking are guiding urban living labs projects.
Paper long abstract:
A global drive towards experiments and experimentation and the idea of 'citizen scientists' as participants is turning cities into 'living labs' or 'test-beds'. This paper explores practices and notions of laboratory and experiment at play in such endeavours and ask what kinds of experimental thinking are guiding urban living labs projects today. I argue that urban experiments are often not considered scientistic 'demonstration devices' to prove certain facts, inferences or extrapolations, and their proliferation does not reflect modernistic visions of urban science. They are far more speculative and creative. Drawing on the philosophy of science of Francis Bacon, Ian Hacking (1983) suggested that experiments are not "devices with which to bring interpretation to an end, but rather devices with which to point to possible directions and their consequences, realizing that the fingerposts may well be misleading". In the same vein, urban experiments and living labs produce new possibilities and may lend new kinds of wriggle rooms for urban planners today, owing more to New Public Governance than to science. The paper discusses how the experimental spaces of living labs are imagined and exploited, and how anthropologists may carve out opportunities for participation and participant observation in collaborations around urban living labs.