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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’.