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Short abstract:

This paper contributes observations from a collaborative and interdisciplinary global ocean governance project. It notes the interaction of geographic and gendered dimensions to the prioritisation of research values and imaginaries of the ocean, and the challenges to collaborations that result.

Long abstract:

Africa has been identified as lacking capacity to undertake and use deep-sea and offshore research (Bell et al., 2022). International research collaborations, which allow local scientists to access the abyssal depths beyond the range of their technological limits, are a potential solution. These collaborations also provide a site at which we can observe and consider the construction of deep sea science ‘capacity’ and expertise, and how they relate to positionality, epistemic values and epistemic jurisdiction. Based on two years of ethnographic research on an international oceans research project, this paper reveals that A) framing collaborations through a lens of improving research quality and capacity, often takes-for-granted the differences in scientific values and priorities that structure collaboration even when there’s a shared interest in policy impact. B) Research in Africa can often be framed through national development objectives and local researchers often aim to be responsive to a variety of socioeconomic imperatives, community uplift projects and governmental interest in management of ocean resources. Here, these aims are contrasted with the prioritisation of prestige science, namely: ‘innovation’, ‘excellence’ and ‘discovery’, the preoccupations in wealthier nations. The tendency to frame expeditions through storied histories of oceanography, the Challenger expedition is an example, emphasises masculinity and discovery.

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Short abstract:

This paper discusses the challenges of collaborative STS today by ethnographically engaging with research projects a robotics lab in Osaka, Japan, documenting the clashes and negotiations of as intellectual ideas travel across disciplines, institutions and the public sphere.

Long abstract:

Robotics in Japan has a history of public engagement since the 20th century: while the country’s post-war development made Japan the world’s largest industrial robot producer in the 1970s, its exacerbating population problems, such as ageing and ultra-low fertility, have repeatedly led policymakers to frame social robots providing love and care as “technological fixes”, producing initiatives that explicitly invite the roboticists’ vision into the public arena. Such an environment is coupled with the field’s active presence in interdisciplinary conversations, allowing STS and anthropology scholars to experiment with collaborative scholarship.

From co-publishing with psychologists to recruiting philosophy faculty, Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Osaka is famed for its persistent pursuit of an android science that brings together engineering, science and humanities disciplines. However, the day-to-day exchanges in the laboratory are characterised by scepticism and friction between different professions, as those epistemological interventions meet the laboratory’s hierarchical structure and disciplinary confines. This paper approaches the history of Ishiguro Laboratory’s cultivation of a hybrid knowledge culture and discusses ethnographic engagements with the lab’s collaborative projects. It also examines the laboratory’s publicisation and commercialisation efforts in Japan, where the roboticists and robots travel to spaces of social experiments. This paper discusses the challenges of collaborative STS today by documenting the intellectual ideals produced within the lab that inevitably clash and negotiate with existing infrastructures and public expectations.

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Short abstract:

This paper examines the cooperation based on mutual-trust, between small and marginal farmers and financiers in banana plantation ventures of Daranggiri. The farmers usually repay the loan once they accrue profit post-production, followed by remaining amount shared in-between as an established norm.

Long abstract:

Located at Goalpara district of Assam, India and inhabited mostly by the plain tribes of Rabha, Koch and Garo, this paper attempts at capturing how kinsmen, relatives and village-fellows act as ‘financiers’ to the banana cultivators of Daranggiri, fostering an informal collaboration and pragmatic growth. “This system works best unlike bank-loans, because there is no paper-work required, and all of us could equally prosper”, says a small-scale producer, which certainly over time has enhanced their entrepreneurial skills, productivity and purchasing power. The growth of the site entails its team-effort to ensure a stable market via the ‘middlemen’, who buy their produce at bulk and transport them to the nearby regions. Apart from native-grown varieties of Cheni- Champa, Malbhog, Jahaji; extensive research on hybrid/improved varieties are also carried out by government institutions such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and as experimentation, G9 tissue-cultured banana plantlets were distributed to the farming community a few years back, to verify its adaptability, growth and market-demand. Today Daranggiri has turned out as a banana epicentre and the reputation it held for its ‘retail banana market’, which is one of Asia’s largest and biggest (The Hindu, 2016) shines, out of years of joint-collaborative effort of research-production-marketing-transportation network. The objective of this paper is to understand this external linkage of overlapping units alongside unravelling how the internal collaboration between actors/financiers/middlemen works. A possible outcome is expected at locating the role of ‘networking’ and potential for collaboration among different actors and institutions in banana fruit production.

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Short abstract:

The paper deals with multiplicity and disruption of scientific collaboration in the Arctic region in times of urgency (1) during the Cold War (2) during Russian-Ukrainian military conflict through the lens of science diplomacy and STS, with a focus on the co-production of science and geopolitics.

Long abstract:

This presentation discusses the dynamics of scientific collaboration between different stakeholders in the Arctic region through the lens of STS and science diplomacy. Particular focus is placed on scientific encounters and interchanges between Russia and the West during the Cold War, and on the present-day challenges and limitations as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent scientific sanctions on joint work with Russian institutions and scholars. I will explore trans-epistemic assemblages made of human and non-human beings which have been assembled, reassembled and disassembled within Arctic research in turbulent times of climatic urgency and military conflicts. I highlight that the Arctic Council faces uncertain socio-technical imaginaries, particularly regarding climate change knowledge production, mediation and circulation within and beyond the region across the borders. I further develop the concept of science and geopolitics as ‘co-produced’ and analyse how consideration of previous joint research activities and initiatives might shed light on what can be achieved under the present circumstances to restore trust between various actors and transform the Arctic into a more sustainable space in 2024.

This contribution is a traditional paper entangled with a dialogue session centred on the following questions: (1) to collaborate or not to collaborate in the Arctic region in the current geopolitical climate? (2) in which particular ways would non-collaboration be transformative? (3) which lessons from the past could be learnt to transform today's non-collaborative practices?

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Short abstract:

LGBTQ+ voices are poorly understood and represented in UK emergency planning and response. Taking a disaster injustice lens we explore potential positive new collaborations between responders and people with sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC).

Long abstract:

LGBTQ+ voices are poorly understood and poorly represented within planning and response to UK emergencies, which tend to be generic and reductive in nature. In this paper we explore the potential for positive new collaborations between responders and people with sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics (SOGIESC). We propose that advances could be made by practitioners to better anticipate, incorporate and respond to the needs of individuals within the structures, technologies and spaces of emergency management in the UK.

This paper is based on a forthcoming book chapter (under peer review) believed to be the first review of gender and sexual diversity inclusion in UK emergency management. Through a review of literature, and a reflection on the authors’ experiences, we identify that an explicit focus on SOGIESC in UK emergency arrangements appears to be missing. This gap represents a kind of disaster injustice (Lukasiewicz & Baldwin, 2020) as the epistemic cultures and technologies of disaster do not adequately include the very people who might be most affected by disasters in the development or delivery or response plans.

We propose that practitioner allyship could provide a route to engaging in fruitful, mutually beneficial dialogue and action. We offer that inclusion of SOGIESC experiences in developing materials, in planning and decision-making spaces, and in training and exercising would ensure emergency response is alive not only to the concerns and challenges faced by people with diverse SOGIESC, but also the contributions they could make in disaster response.

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Short abstract:

I present my work on power dynamics in decision-making at the micro-level of African-European research collaborations. How do ‘acts of power’ in collaborative practises and spaces show who decides, how, and why this matters for transformative collaborative science?

Long abstract:

Despite calls from scientists for inter-, trans-, and post-disciplinary science collaborations that can foster solutions for our shared sustainability challenges, ‘global science’ remains a stage of unequal resource distribution. Research shows such imbalances in academia, such as the disparity of scientific recognition and contribution between countries in Africa and Europe, including in joint collaborations. This privilege of certain actors above others has implications for the epistemic diversity scientists call for, towards transformative science. Whilst macro-level challenges – related to research funding, authorship and mobility – are well documented, little remains empirically understood about how research collaborations are practiced at the micro-level, and how imbalances play out in collaborative spaces amongst academic actors.

I address these matters in my ethnographic study of six international research collaborations that focus on sustainability, with researchers based in seven countries across Africa and five in Europe. I identify key moments of decision-making, or ‘acts of power’, during my fieldwork, and analyse how decisions are negotiated, and opened (or closed) for discussion. This analysis enables me to highlight key challenges and patterns related to power in these collaborations, and bring into discussion how power is exercised by collaborators as well as implications for knowledge production.

This conference is itself a space of far-reaching international scientific exchange in STS and the social sciences, and thus a fitting moment to reflect about this topic of power in research culture. In doing so, we may encourage transformative collaborations in our own fields and spaces.

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Short abstract:

Multilevel boundaries stifle interprofessional collaboration. Actors create boundary organizations to bridge social worlds and enable collaboration. However, these initiatives organized at professional and organizational levels face hindrances from national-level boundaries.

Long abstract:

Fragmented care delivery, driven by specialization and liberalization, is increasingly prevalent in Western countries. Especially for individuals with ‘complex care needs’ facing difficulties on multiple facets of life, service delivery takes place within an institutionally layered context. Diverse actors from numerous organizations with distinct values, interests, and epistemic cultures are involved. To traverse the different social worlds of these actor groups and enable collaboration, professionals engage in boundary work. Previous studies on boundary work focus on specific professional or organizational levels. This study, however, explores the layered and interconnected nature of boundaries and the boundary work frontline professionals conduct to enable interprofessional collaboration.

We used the service delivery for people with ‘misunderstood behaviour’ in the Netherlands as a case study. This constructed group, involving the support from professionals of both the care, safety, and social domain, is an example of people with complex care needs par excellence. We conducted 67 interviews with frontline professionals from 40 organizations such as public health services, municipalities, police, mental health organizations and housing cooperatives.

Frontline professionals employ three types of boundary work, with cross-sector boundary organizations aiding in bridging epistemic cultures and social worlds. However, professionals were limited in their boundary work by national-level boundaries. Continuity in collaboration necessitates ongoing boundary work at multiple levels. As such, boundary organizations in the form of cross-level learning networks, emerge as a sustainable infrastructure to transform collaborations. The impact of national-level boundaries on interprofessional collaboration is underexplored in the literature; our contribution is recognizing this layered complexity.

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Short abstract:

The presentation examines the role of imaginaries of collaboration and how they facilitate, hinder, and shape collaborative action. Drawing from two ethnographic case studies, we present how researchers make sense of the research centers’ proposed imaginaries to work interdisciplinarily.

Long abstract:

The presentation examines the role of imaginaries of collaboration and how they facilitate, hinder, and shape collaborative action. Borrowing the notion of practice-bound imaginaries (Hyysalo, 2006), we seek to denote those imaginaries bound to the specific practice of interdisciplinary collaboration. Imaginaries of collaboration are thought to guide and provide meaning to collaboration; they are understood as concrete sets of expectations, tools, ways of doing, and imagining. The focus of the talk is on unraveling how imaginaries of collaboration come into being and how they are enacted. Specifically, we are interested in how taken-for-granted ideas typically associated with collaboration, such as “crossing boundaries,” "shared goals," and "equality," are represented in such imaginaries.

Drawing from two ethnographic case studies at the interdisciplinary research centers "Science of Intelligence" and "Digital Life Norway," we observe how researchers make sense of the centers’ proposed imaginaries to work interdisciplinarily. Both centers invested in shaping specific imaginaries of collaboration, providing expectations, visions, and tools. However, the imaginaries of collaboration animating collaboration successfully over time were unlike the centers' vision, characterized by non-linear, hybrid, and organic ideas. Our analysis unfolds the process of enacting these imaginaries.

These empirical findings prompt a broader reflection on the concept of collaboration, offering instructive insights for approaching collaborative endeavors differently: Do collaborations require convergence, shared understanding, and goals? Or can we imagine collaborations to work despite the differences and conflicts they may produce?