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Short abstract:

In this presentation we analyze recent ‘systemic turns’ across public engagement and responsible innovation literature calling for more holistic approaches that can investigate the wider institutional contexts that shape public engagement itself.

Long abstract:

In exploring ways of doing science with, rather than for publics, public engagement and responsible innovation research is vital in democratizing science. However, in recent case-study based research that dominates the public engagement literature, authors raise questions about the field’s intertwinement with the institutional systems it simultaneously tries to transform.

To clarify how the field understands its own positionality in democratizing science, in this presentation we will analyze recent ‘systemic turns’ across public engagement and responsible innovation literature calling for more holistic approaches that can investigate the wider institutional contexts that shape public engagement itself.

We present persistent – and yet, equally ambiguous and contradictory – notions of institutional systems as rather static and inherently powerful. While literature about power is widely available in the field, there are insufficient narratives that recognize public engagement and responsible innovation research as rooted in power. We argue for a more fundamental reconfiguration of acting ‘in the name of’ science to account for the vantage points from which such research produces and democratizes science.