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Short abstract:

A fourth 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?

A fourth 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).