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- Convenors:
-
Tess Doezema
(Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Nina Frahm
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We explore the dynamics by which society and democracy are mobilized as central to the production and justification of technoscience. From critiques of power to novel modes of STS intervention, we pursue symmetrical analysis of invocations and implementations of democracy, ethics, and participation.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades, social agency, control, and participation in technoscientific development has increasingly moved to the center of governance rationales, arguably presenting a shift from technological to social fix logics in the narratives of sociotechnical change (Frahm et al., 2021). These logics are today mainstreamed across institutions, sectors, and actors through frameworks and instruments such as Responsible Research and Innovation to Co-creation, Mission-oriented Innovation, or, most recently, AI Ethics. In this panel, we aim to engage a pragmatist reading of these new governance imperatives and corollary avenues for analyzing, critiquing and intervening in them. We invite contributions to help symmetrically trace the new ideological commitments that justify innovation as the central organizing principle of technoscientific governance – what pragmatist sociologists have referred to as the “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999), and which we are referring to as the “new spirit of technoscience” (Doezema & Frahm, Forthcoming). This entails taking democratic politics equally (alongside technoscience) as an explicit site of symmetrical analysis. Rather than offer democracy as an ideal attainable through public engagement, such an approach inquires how notions and practices of democracy are being produced in dynamic relation to technoscientific change. Questions guiding the panel discussion include, but are not limited to: How can we explain the turn toward society and the different discourses through which society and social expertise are portrayed as key actors in governing the advance of technoscience? Which visions of socio-technical progress guide these novel justificatory discourses, and how are they informed by larger, historically grounded imaginaries of democracy and self-governance by the people? How is attention to social agency and responsibility re-shaping governance arrangements, including the production of new, asymmetrical visions of appropriate relationships between science, technology and society? How can these changes inform interventionist strategies of STS researchers?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Tess Doezema (Autonomous University of Barcelona) Nina Frahm
Long abstract:
How can the critical sensibility underwriting the engaged streams of STS account for the institutional rationalities whereby publics are no longer imagined to be outside of technoscientific development, but rather central to its success and legitimation? In this presentation we argue that an appreciable shift has taken place in “the imagined relationship between technoscience and society, and in particular the modalities by which innovation is legitimized as a central organizing principle for the pursuit of human wellbeing.” Analysing the relationship between capitalism and critique, Boltanski and Chiapello (1999) theorize a series of changes in the ‘spirit of capitalism’– a heuristic we take up in our analysis of the new spirit of technoscience (Doezema and Frahm 2023). In this process, various kinds of public participation and application of social values and ethical deliberation and expertise have been normalized as a ‘fix’ for innovation, in turn constructing notions and practices of democracy, ethics, and the public good into technoscientific imaginaries. European funding proposals, for instance, like the JUST2CE project, from which this presentation draws, now demand work packages designed around public or end-user engagement, responsible innovation, and open science activities. This new spirit of technoscience calls for new modalities of critique, and we argue, for a recalibration of symmetry with particular attention to democracy as an object of study, constructed in situ within technoscientific projects and as part of institutional rationalities.
Doezema, Tess & Nina Frahm (2023) The new spirit of technoscience:
recalibrating symmetrical STS critique, JRI, 10:1, 2281112.
Boltanski, Luc, and Ève Chiapello (1999) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso.
Cecilie Hilmer (UCL (University College London))
Long abstract:
By critically exploring the emergence of mission-oriented innovation imaginaries, I would like to discuss how talk and practice around missions by policymakers involves a powerful shift in focus in technoscientific governance from responsibility as individual moral decision-making to missions as the undeniable trajectory that technoscience must take to meet plantery-scale challenges such as climate change. Through the discourse of missions – including all of the connotations connecting missions to white Christian saviourism and the military – Europe’s position as an “innovation leader” through large-scale infrastructural projects, is justified. In the process, local politics with its conflicts and ambiguities evaporates are replaced with omnipotent visions of the greater good. Mission-oriented innovation threatens to obscure the subjective and tacit conditions and processes that bring about collective decisions through an idealised “common good”.
Through the study of policy documents, interviews with policymakers, and grey literature on mission-oriented innovation, I will explore how the totalising fantasies of missions are produced via forms of speech and legitimation, tacit value decisions about the common good, the articulation of challenges, questions, and conflicts. I argue that by positioning the science and innovation projects as sites in which political decisions in the name of a common and collective good are taken, these projects become sites of decentralized politics.
Annapurna Mamidipudi (Deutsches Museum)
Long abstract:
In this abstract, I take up how Karen Barad’s idea of complementarity -- when measurement is taken as material conceptual practice it entails that the variables be simultaneously necessary and mutually exclusive, thus complementary rather than incommensurable as in the uncertainty principle proposed by Trevor Pinch -through understanding both Innovation and Democracy as counting devices. Innovation is by definition success in the market where Science is measured in terms of more or less money it makes -success is defined by numbers -which in turn re-orders scientific research as capitalist commodity; Democratic achievements as electoral wins base their success in the number of bodies, so is prone to majoritarianism, rather than objective governance, again a matter for counting and numbers. While in general view, the domains of innovation and democracy might be seen as different kinds of activity and mutually exclusive till policy brings them together, I suggest that all knowledge-making and democracy-making are based on social actions, networks and social relationships. Yet since the achievements of both are measured through counting individual bodes -as citizens, or users, or money, a measurement does not take into account the social nature of the bodies -old, young, productive, reproductive, individual and collective, it only perpetuates mutual exclusivity as principle, rather than complementarity. Thus I explore through the material discursive logic of hand weaving, what would happen if we think of Innovation and Democracy as following a central logic -of counting in a linear numerical system, that legitimates innovation, services capitalism and is one of the instruments by which it endures.