Short abstract:

Another third wave of STS takes a practice turn on political representation: How are the people made to speak and act collectively in relation with issues of science and technology? This brings the performativity of methods into view and asks for an STS of the sciences and technologies of democracy.

Long abstract:

The second wave of STS opened the black-box of scientific practice and demanded that “the people” participate in the making of collective orders by these other means. Collins’ and Evans’ proclaimed a third wave raising the “problem of extension”, when everybody would become an expert on everything, thus differentiating levels of technical experience to qualify people for a voice. This ignores that issues are only constituted as technical through prior framing decisions. STS therefore remains with the issue of how the public can speak and act collectively on issues of science and technology. How can the complexity of the people ‘in the wild’ be productively reduced for participation in and democratization of experimental world-ordering?

Another third wave of STS tackles this question by taking a “practice turn” on political representation. Instead of philosophically defining truthful representation of the people (with ready-made political theories) it empirically traces various practices of experimentally articulating “representative claims” (Saward) on behalf of “the public”, “the people”, “society”, “social groups” or any collective subjectivity (see “constructivist turn in political theory”, Disch et al).

This research focuses on mapping the diversity of practices as “ecologies of participation” (Chilvers), on the performativity of specific methods of representation as “technologies of democracy” (Laurent), each with a specific “bias” (Gomart/Hajer) and “collateral realities” (Law), together constituting “the demos multiple”. A next step, then is to study their innovation journeys and, here again, the role of epistemic practices, especially political science, in shaping the becoming of democracy (Voß).

Short abstract:

We explore the possibilities of STS observatories for remaking participation and democracy, through developing a framework for this new kind of observatory and reflecting on its application in work to establish a public engagement observatory for energy and climate change.

Long abstract:

Observatories have a long history in relations between science, participation and society. While observatories have traditionally studied natural phenomena, they have increasingly turned to focus on social things and developed across the social sciences and science and technology studies (STS). In this paper we explore the possible contributions of STS-related observatories in remaking participation and democracy. Building on paths for remaking participation, we present a framework for a new kind of observatory that takes a co-productionist approach to studying and intervening in public participation and sociotechnical transformations based on four interrelating components: (i) mapping ecologies of participation; (ii) experiments in participation; (iii) reflexive learning and anticipation; and (iv) responsiveness. We reflect on the application of this framework in work to establish a public engagement observatory for energy and climate change in the UK and its translation into other areas such as AI and biodiversity. We show how such formations cultivate more systemic and distributed approaches to participation and responsible innovation. We draw lessons and consider prospects for STS-related observatories in remaking participation and democracy, emphasising the need for more public, distributed and experimental formations that work with, in and for - not on or above - science, democracy and society.

Short abstract:

This presentation will engage with three kinds of left-behinds (residues) of innovation which are (made) invisible. Through creating participatory spaces, we want to render residues visible and explore how citizens conceptualize, make sense of, live with, and expect (to) care for them.

Long abstract:

Over the past decades, participation, governance and democracy have been critically debated in the context of technoscientific choices. Many of these engagements have focused on the emergence of innovations and on how to better align them with societal values (c.f., the RRI discourse). While this is a valuable starting point, it misses an important dimension.

Reading innovation processes in reverse, the ERC grant project “Innovation residues – Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for our Longue-durée Environmental Futures” (PI: Ulrike Felt; GA1010545) invites to look at left-behinds (residues) of innovations. In doing so, we analyse how contemporary societies conceptualize, make sense of, live with, and care for residues as well as how this impacts innovation choices. We focus on three residues: nuclear waste, microplastics and data waste. All three are (made) invisible in different ways, and yet have to be confronted as matters of concern, and at best – become matters of care.

How can we render the aforementioned residues visible to politically engage with them? This is one of the challenges we address. Developing participatory spaces for citizen engagement, we investigate comparatively (1) the (cultural) resources citizens draw on to discuss innovation residues (2) the visions of democracy embedded in their reflections on past choices and future forms of care; (3) the complex relations between matters of facts, concern and care; (4) the geographies of responsibility constructed around innovation residues; and (5) the envisioning of potential ways towards future social-ecological transformations.

We will present our methodological approach and preliminary insights.

Short abstract:

This presentation uses Isabelle Stengers’ philosophy to unpack the idealised concepts of democracy and participation in a case of a legislative reform regulating mental health and addiction services.

Long abstract:

One of the most profound democratic ideals is that of participation: the elevating ideal of citizens taking part in political decision-making concerning their common issues. In this presentation I will examine how the ideals of democracy and participation are co-produced, contested and evoked within a specific case of drafting novel legislation to regulate mental health and addiction services in Finland. This legislative process took several years and harnessed a multiplicity of expertise and experience from scientific experts and professionals working in social and health care to small NGO’s and service users as experts-by-experience.

I am interested in how the formats and platforms for participation shape notions of experience and expertise: what kinds of knowledges are considered as valid? Who gets to participate and how? Drawing on Isabelle Stengers’ speculative philosophy, I explore the interweaving of the involved actors’ (subjective) experience and (objective) knowledge. The focus is on relations between professional common sense and the misplaced abstractions of specialised forms of knowledge in this specific legislative setting in social and health care. In this legislative reform, the concepts of democracy and participation become technologised and bureaucratised making them ‘factishes’ of a kind. I wonder if there is a way these idealised concepts can be remade by making sense in common?

Short abstract:

I develop a pragmatics of documentation and demonstration to describe how literary technologies are entangled with technologies of affect, thereby positioning low tech at once as doable, reasonable and desirable for the wider public.

Long abstract:

Critiques of high-tech are increasingly common. One site in which this critique is visible, are the initiatives that aim to develop and document technologies that are more convivial, accessible, useful, repairable and sustainable than current technologies. This paper is concerned with such “low” technologies, by asking how they are experimented with and how they are documented. Based on a study of experimental settings in which people live with various kinds of low-tech tools, the paper analyses documentation and demonstration practices. Aiming to reach a wide audience, these practices mobilize various formats: tutorials that present ‘cookbook recipes’ for low techs, reports that assess experimentations in a scientific way, and videos that stage low techs as key actors in ecological lifestyles and part of modern adventures. The paper shows that documents not only record how low techs are experimented with, but that they also demonstrate that they are worth living with. Arguing that we need to develop a ‘pragmatics of documentation and demonstration’, the paper describes how literary technologies are entangled with technologies of affect, thereby positioning low techs at once as doable, reasonable and desirable for the wider public.

Short abstract:

Based on an ethnographic study conducted in a PPP in Vienna, Austria, this contribution tackles the questions of what citizen participation does and how it creates a public in order to address the larger question of how participation practices reproduce certain imaginaries about the local democracy.

Long abstract:

This academic paper contribution takes citizen participation in the context of urban renewal in Vienna, Austria, as its object of study. I tackle the questions of what citizen participation does and how it creates a public in order to address the larger question of how participation practices reproduce certain imaginaries about the local democracy. I argue that ideas about participation and democracy on the one hand and the tools and technologies policymakers have at hand to conduct participation practices and represent its outcomes on the other hand are co-produced. Like other aspects of urban renewal policies, participation practices are influenced by broader norms. For instance, the democratic principle of the majority rule is echoed in the foregrounding of participant numbers in the data production process of citizen participation. The other way around, specific participation technologies such as genuinely performing inclusiveness reinforce a particular image of the local democracy, e.g. as representative of the relevant population. This creates legitimacy for the overall project of renewal and reinforces the image of a representative democratic system despite precisely the legitimacy invisibilizing whose participation is legible through the employed participation technologies and whose is not.

I base my analysis on ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted with an Urban Renewal Office, a public service facility enacted in a PPP between a Municipal Department and architectural firms. Here I have observed policymakers enact the citizen participation process accompanying the renewal of the road I give the pseudonym Theater Street.

Short abstract:

This paper explores the transformation of public figures through innovation processes. Three key figures emerge in the establishment of co-construction, a participatory mode aligning the goals of both the public and private sectors: the Post-It Citizen, personas, and partners.

Long abstract:

In this paper, I present the results of my thesis on the transformation of public figures and participation through innovation processes, focusing on the "Smart Region" program in the Paris Region. Through an immersive field study with the regional council (2020-2023), my research delves into their efforts to establish "co-construction," a participatory mode aligning the goals of the public and private sectors.

I demonstrate how co-construction is defined as a fast, low-cost, and flexible engagement approach that caters to the needs of citizens while also serving the interests of companies and startups. This definition is embedded in a workshop technology using Post-It notes. I then explore the shaping process of three Smart Region public categories. The first is the Post-It Citizen, a non-politicized potential innovator mobilized in a heterogeneous way.

Next, I present two actively involved public figures: personas, fictional representations of citizens; and partners, collaborating with the regional council and being ask to represent citizen needs. These figures are more easily mobilized through innovation processes, effectively the only ones involved "as" citizens. The regional council's constraints, desiring a specific citizen type (the Post-It citizen, effectively nonexistent) and seeking rapid, cost-effective innovation, lead to opting for easy solutions: creating citizens from scratch or engaging partners. Paradoxically, this results in the disappearance of the citizen, only effectively mobilized through substitute means throughout the innovation process.

Short abstract:

This paper ethnographically explores climate talk in the online public sphere. It focuses on practices of communication and conflict moderation on Extinction Rebellion NL social media. I show how specific notions of rationality, expertise, and participation are constructed in online discussions.

Long abstract:

Talk in online public spaces can quickly get heated, especially when discussing polarizing topics. Classic deliberative norms vanish from the discussion, and hate speech prevails. One such a polarizing topic is the climate. This paper looks at discussions around this topic, and provides an ethnographic exploration of climate conflict in the online public sphere. It zooms in on one case study: the social media channels of the Dutch branch of Extinction Rebellion. I look at the interaction between regular platform users, Extinction Rebellion officials, and the social media platforms on which they communicate. My research consists of digital participant observation of the Extinction Rebellion social media channels, combined with in-depth interviews with platform users and Extinction Rebellion officials.

Through the presentation of this ethnographic data, I sketch an affectively polarized landscape of online climate talk. I demonstrate how practices of communication and conflict moderation—not just the content of the disagreement—can have a significant polarizing effect. Specifically, by focusing the practices of communication and conflict moderation, the data illuminates how specific notions of rationality and expertise are constructed in these digitally mediated discussions, and how this feeds into the polarization of online climate talk. The results of this research speak to the connection between democracy and (digital) participation: what is ‘good’ participation in democratic systems—if there even is such a thing—and how can and should this be fostered in online public spaces?

Short abstract:

The paper discusses a provocative foray into deliberative research with Chat-GPT. It asks why the media of deliberative practice so often seem to evade sociotechnical critique.

Long abstract:

Deliberative research methodologies have long been instrumentalised for producing public responses to technoscientific uncertainty. Contingencies and machinations involved in generating informed deliberation have now been widely scrutinised, highlighting how expert curation of topical resources can frame public issues and demarcate the scope of legitimate contestation. Still, relatively limited attention has been given to the roles media-technologies play in the practice of small-group deliberation. This paper will ask why the media of deliberative practice so often seem to evade sociotechnical critique. In pursuing this question, I’ll discuss a methodological provocation that involved deploying Chat-GPT in deliberative research addressing technologies for carbon dioxide removal. By introducing the highly sensationalised “AI” device, we sought to explore whether participant generated texts would impact focused discussion and, specifically, how uncertainties around machine-learning technologies might enter into appraisals of carbon removal futures. The paper will discuss some of the different configurations of expertise, media and uncertainty generated in 4 UK-based workshops. It will reflect on some distinctive problems that generative media-technologies may pose for deliberative research and how they might be appropriated for experiments in participation.

Short abstract:

Living Labs (LL) have emerged as relevant inter- or transdisciplinary settings for the co-production of socio-technical innovations. This contribution explores the current and the potential role of technical universities in ecologies of participation emerging from research in and across LL settings.

Long abstract:

Living Labs (LLs) have emerged as relevant platforms for the co-design, co-production and co-evaluation of socio-technical innovations. In these settings, participation and experimentation form the basis for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration. RWTH Aachen University pursues an ambitious plan to strengthen participation in and through LLs as part of its Excellence Strategy. To this end, the Living Labs Incubator has been tasked with connecting, studying and supporting existing and emerging LLs and has built a database and network of over 40 LLs.

Recent conceptual advancements in STS regarding ecologies of participation invite an analysis of participatory approaches from a systemic perspective. Therefore, the proposed contribution addresses the question, how STS perspectives can aid in mapping, analysing and strengthening participatory approaches to science and technology development across a network of disparate LLs around a university. The discussion centres on the variety of participatory methods in LLs emerging from particular inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations at different scale levels.

Based on 32 semi-structured interviews with LL researchers, the analysis explores participatory methods across different types of LLs. Next to mere public outreach activities and tendencies to instrumentalise participation, many LLs feature broad public deliberation or technology appraisal. Especially local projects concerned with urban planning (theory) emerge as examples of LLs open to participation and able to engage with proliferating society-led initiatives. At the regional level, instruments and initiatives for bottom-up participation and deliberation appear scarcer. The analysis seeks to broaden the ecologies of participation perspective to a reflection on the (potential) role of universities.

Short abstract:

This paper analyses case studies of three areas in which European projects have examined, designed, implemented, and strengthened co-creation activities across robotics innovation, engineering education, and science with and for society.

Long abstract:

In the last decade, the European Union has given increasing attention to the involvement of society in the production of knowledge, the design of profitable technologies, and the definition of solutions to societal challenges of different magnitudes. The keyword that guides these activities is “co-creation”. This paper analyses case studies of three areas in which European projects have examined, designed, implemented, and strengthened co-creation activities. These include (1) open innovation projects on robotics, (2) educational actions promoted by one alliance of the Erasmus+ funded European Universities Initiative (EUI), and a comparative explorative project on co-creation funded by the Horizon 2020 Science with and for Society Programme (SwafS). These projects are examined by looking at their overarching rationalities, goals, technologies of participation, and the obstacles they encountered. The robotics projects mobilised co-creation intending to accelerate acceptance of these technologies and create new markets. The EUI alliance implemented co-creation to form holistic European engineers and engineering education. The SwafS project advocated for a situated understanding of co-creation, emphasising that co-creation processes and solutions should be tailored according to socio-cultural conditions of their contexts of implementation. The paper closes with a discussion of challenges posed by these contrasting rationalities of co-creation, their incompatibilities, and the multiple obstacles to bring them together. The paper thus provides avenues for ecologising participation in European progammes.

Short abstract:

This paper considers co-creation as an emerging mode of participation in science, technology, and innovation. By reflecting on how co-creation transforms notions of participation towards economic ideals, it explores emerging roles for STS in remaking participation in responsible ways.

Long abstract:

Over roughly the past decade, co-creation has emerged within the participation discourse as an allegedly new mode of engaging publics in science, technology, innovation, and their governance. Despite being an ‘unlikely candidate’ with its origins in marketing and business contexts, co-creation entails a whole range of promises, such as aligning innovation outcomes with societal needs, taking into account different forms of knowing, or involving publics throughout innovation processes. From this perspective, co-creation seems to respond to decades’ worth of STS critique of public engagement with science and technology in many ways. A closer consideration, however, reveals that co-creation may contribute, in similar ways as public engagement, to the justification of pre-established decisions, deficit constructions of publics, and the configuration of certain perspectives as more or less desirable. At the same time, however, co-creation seems to rewrite previous notions of participation into a new troublesome economic guise that portrays economic growth through technological innovation as a self-evident objective and operates in narrowly framed problem-solution packages that tend to undermine alternative social solutions. Drawing on both a discourse analysis of co-creation at the European level and a three-year participant observation at a German municipality, this paper contemplates, how STS research, in light of its several waves of critique of public engagement, has contributed to the versions of co-creation that are currently circulating. In doing so, it explores how STS research may (or may not?) contribute to a remaking of participation within broader trends that subject enactments of democracy to increasingly economizing tendencies.