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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.