Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jane Calvert
(University of Edinburgh)
Koichi Mikami (Keio University)
Cookie Egret (Colorado State University)
Sophie Stone (The University of Edinburgh)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
How can we stop responsible research and innovation becoming narrow and formulaic? In other words, how can we keep it weird? Can thinking in terms of spaces, (multi)species and serendipity provide opportunities for more expansive, reflexive and transformative approaches to RRI?
Long Abstract:
Responsible research and innovation—a concept that remains underdefined, and therefore fluid— can be a useful heading for embedded STS work. But it can become a placeholder for more familiar and tractable activities such as public outreach or research integrity, or operationalized as a set of steps or a checklist for researchers to follow. This tends to close down reflective capacity rather than open it up. To counteract these tendencies, this panel explores ways of keeping RRI weird by thinking of it in terms of spaces, species and serendipity. We draw on examples from our ongoing work on synthetic biology.
Talks will explore attempts to create spaces for RRI by carving out opportunities for collaboration at scientific conferences and meetings, often at the peripheries and fringes of these events. We also discuss interdisciplinary workshops we have designed that aim to create spaces for multi-species response-ability, on the grounds that attending to other-than-human species is a way to cultivate livelier understandings of RRI. Being responsive to other species requires that we are open to the unexpected, and further contributions to the session trace the serendipitous paths that have led us back to the unlikely organisms of the Burgess Shale, back to the Asilomar meeting and its legacies and forward to current policy discussions. In all these contexts, we explore the ways in which thinking in terms of spaces, species and serendipity might provide opportunities for more expansive, reflexive and transformative approaches to RRI.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Cookie Egret (Colorado State University)
Short abstract:
Can we perform the workshop or does the workshop perform me? Staging more sympoietic event organizing methods, rather than autopoietic ones, requires letting go of control a bit. I frame this as a type of harm reduction for how we engage with and curate STS events, knowledges and identities.
Long abstract:
Undergirded by a reflective narrative on a recent international, interdisciplinary workshop on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Fort Collins, Colorado, I think through how more sympoietic event-hosting methods reduce harm from entrenched assumptions about what counts as “professional” and “knowledge”. Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and her framing of the notion of ‘autopoiesis’ (being self-made and contained) as a story – not a biological given – and adding Haraway’s notion of ‘sympoiesis’ (making & being made-with) reminds us that it matters what stories we use to stage our professional selves, events and theories with. Moving from the impulse to operationalize responsibility, to sitting with response-abilities, required us to deviate from many typical STS workshop conventions; it required us get a bit weird. What happened when we performed this sort of controlled letting go, surprised us. The workshop became a creature itself – a performative, tentative creaturely assemblage – that asked us to “listen” in the sense that Alexis Pauline Gumbs invokes, as "the radical act of slowing down and tuning in” while staying with the trouble of “how?” and “to whom?”. This paper comprises an attempted translation, a “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro) of what this creature taught us, woven with a story of what we did; on how amplifying response-abilities (not just responsibility), serendipity and embodiment, while dampening the impulse to center autopoietic futures, technologies, and professional identities, enabled us to perhaps reduce the harm that comes from assuming what STS methods must look like and do.
Robert Smith (The University of Edinburgh) Jane Calvert (University of Edinburgh)
Short abstract:
Conferences can be important sites of governance in the life sciences. In this presentation, we draw on real and speculative ethnography of meetings to explore how the past haunts the present and future of engineering life.
Long abstract:
Inspired by the incredible diversity of organisms found in the fossil bed of the Burgess Shale, Stephen J. Gould argued for the importance of historical contingency for life on Earth. Synthetic biologists today cite his work to motivate their attempts to construct novel forms of life unconstrained by historical processes. These bold ambitions inevitably give rise to discussions of governance, which in the life sciences usually lead back to the Asilomar meeting on recombinant DNA. In this presentation we explore conferences as sites of governance. As well as discussing meetings we have attended, we engage in ‘speculative ethnography’ to imagine what would have happened if we had been invited to the Asilomar meeting in 1975, and to an Asilomar-inspired meeting on synthetic genomics that has not yet happened at a castle in Tuscany. In all these examples, we explore how the past haunts the present and future of engineering life. We end by asking if it is possible to create spaces that allow people to gather to discuss developments in the life sciences that do not merely replay the meetings of the past.
Erika Szymanski (Colorado State University)
Short abstract:
I present a brief case for keeping RRI fluid, shaken up, and weird by taking a multispecies approach to social needs, response-ability, and personhood, using the motto “Keep RRI Weird” as a topoi to address the serious business of doing ridiculous things.
Long abstract:
I present a brief case for keeping RRI fluid, shaken up, and weird by taking a multispecies approach to social needs, response-ability, and personhood. In one sense, multispecies RRI is a wholly serious proposal. For RRI and other modes of science governance to account for the potential shapes of livable futures, more-than-human interdependencies must be recognized. Society must be defined to include all creatures whose needs and interests matter—to flourishing futures, and to care-full presents. Principles that are well-developed in multispecies studies, including relationality, kin, and care, productively contribute to the kinds of conversations that social scientists often aim to convene through RRI. At the same time, the idea of multispecies RRI tends to scamper in playful, experimental, unsure, weird directions. It becomes necessary to address sincere questions—questions with well-crafted answers in multispecies studies—that still sometimes meander into schoolyard or stoner territory, such as: what does becoming able to respond to a rose bush entail? A raven? A rock? Using the motto “Keep RRI Weird” as a topoi to address the serious business of doing ridiculous things, I argue that multispecies approaches can and should contribute to sedate policy discussions, and that play, irony, and even silliness may be essential in asking earnest questions about whose abilities to respond matter.
Koichi Mikami (Keio University)
Short abstract:
Using Michel Callon’s 1984 article on a sociology of translation as a starting point, this paper examines how engineering biology research to address the problem of plastic pollution may be developed as a response-able program not only to the human need but also from a multi-species perspective.
Long abstract:
“Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” was the title of Michel Callon’s (1984) classic STS article, in which he explains how actors with different perspectives, including scallops (non-human) as well as fishermen (human), come to participate in the program presented by a particular group of scientists. The key for their collaboration is the process of translation, where who they are, what they want and what problem they face all become defined in such a way that the program proposed is identified as the solution that they collectively can and therefore should achieve. Using this Callon’s argument as a starting point, this paper examines a line of research in engineering biology which features Ideonella Sakaiensis, the microbe discovered in 2016 at a plastic bottle recycling facility in Japan that produces a set of enzymes to degrade and utilize polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as a source of energy (Yoshida et al. 2016), and the knowledge produced by studying it. The discovery of this special microbe has stimulated interest of both scientific and non-scientific actors because its unique way of living can offer a solution to us, the humans. But does it also provide a solution to the microbe? If not, who else’s solution can it be, and how the program ought to be developed in order to enroll them as our collaborator(s)? Asking these questions, I argue, invites us to think what make the research response-able from a multi-species perspective.
Sophie Stone (The University of Edinburgh) Robert Smith (The University of Edinburgh)
Short abstract:
Conferences are key to scientific practice but can lack opportunities for multidisciplinary collaboration. We discuss turning a UK synthetic biology conference into a place for collaboration, the use of thinking with ‘spaces’, and how ‘contaminating’ a conference can transform it into a site for RRI
Long abstract:
STS researchers have developed an interest in conferences. These play a valuable role in knowledge production, allow their participants to stay abreast of developments in the field, and act as sites of governance. Conferences are also useful sites for STS research, offering opportunities to observe how social, ethical, and political dimensions are showcased and debated. Yet they are more than mere sites of observation; they are places that assemble diverse audiences, perspectives and knowledges. Can they also be spaces for multidisciplinary collaboration? In this paper, we demonstrate that thinking in terms of ‘spaces’ can offer an expansive understanding of what a conference is, what it could be, and how we might intervene in its performance. We describe an experiment to turn a UK synthetic biology conference into a site for multidisciplinary collaboration with collaborative ethnography. We bring to life the ways that the experiment ‘contaminated’ existing contexts of the scientific conference, and how doing so opened up the possibility for responsible research and innovation (RRI). To illustrate this, we unpack some of the changes to have resulted, including thinking with others across diverse perspectives; destabilising existing hierarchies stimulating discussion and debate; foregrounding hitherto peripheral spaces and registers of discussion; and expanding understanding of social scientific enquiry, de-bounding the places in which it ‘belongs’. We conclude our account by arguing that contamination is two-way, illustrating how the carnivalesque, effervescent, and transient nature of the conference helps keep RRI lively, engaging, and ‘in process’.