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- Convenors:
-
Les Levidow
(Open University)
Luigi Pellizzoni (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa-Florence)
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- Theme:
- Collective contestation
- Location:
- Economy 1
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract:
'Inclusive innovation' has been widely promoted. Questions: i) How do collective projects reshape technoscientific innovation for/by contesting socio-economic inequalities? ii) What specific features make collective projects effective in promoting inclusive innovation for social justice?
Long Abstract:
'Inclusive innovation' has been recently promoted by various state bodies. The EU's Europe 2020 strategy seeks to achieve 'smart, sustainable and inclusive growth' through innovation partnerships addressing major societal challenges. The EU's overall strategy emphasises technoscientific innovation as a crucial means for economic competitiveness and thus inclusiveness. Yet 'inclusion' discourses readily obscure the sources of inequality and exclusion. In dominant portrayals, 'unequal outcomes associated with science and technology are usually interpreted as emerging from patterns of distribution, access, and affordability, not from the structure of the R&D enterprise itself'; by contrast, any socio-economic improvements are attributed to a technology per se (Woodhouse and Sarewitz, 2007); such improvements are rarely attributed to users' collective power. These portrayals obscure how technological design facilitates the dominant power to appropriate labour and natural resources - likewise how such power relations have been contested through collective projects reshaping innovation (Smith et al., 2014). For example, environmental justice movements contest dominant accounts of resources, not simply their inequitable distribution (Martin, 2013; Schlosberg, 2004).
This track will focus on such contestations from theoretical and/or empirical viewpoints. Abstracts should address these two questions:
i) How do collective projects reshape technoscientific innovation for/by contesting socio-economic inequalities?
ii) What specific features make collective projects effective in promoting inclusive innovation for social justice?
Contact convenors for the References.
The papers will be presented in the order shown and within one session
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 September, 2014, -Paper long abstract:
This paper provides insights into the limits of inclusivity in innovation using rapid participatory approaches.
Our research used a methodology called PROTEE to explore objects and relationships in two rapid participatory technology development projects with vulnerable communities. The projects were part of an overarching project to support citizen-led societal innovation through the development of technology-mediated solutions to social needs.
We identify two key features of such projects that risk perpetuating inequalities through dominant narratives of prototype as endgame. These are:
a) a focus on material prototypes as discrete entities and indexes of project success and
b) an un-problematized perception of user participation which can further perpetuate the project's implicit and uncontested narrative of inclusion/exclusion .
Both projects were successful in terms of rapidly producing prototypes that were adopted by communities, secured follow-on funding and potential commercial interest.
However, as social scientists working with these projects we were acutely aware that the dominant representations of these projects and their prototypes created some collectivities whilst simultaneously disenfranchising others. Using data from our PROTEE dialogues, we articulate how the 'overspills' and 'excesses', the misbehaviours and relationships that are typically left out of the narrative of 'prototype as endgame' are vital to attend to (Michael, 2012).
We argue that the details, subtleties, complex negotiations and experiences of relationships and possible 'discarded' prototypes offer subtle clues as to how to critically reconfigure narratives of inclusive(/exclusive) innovations and to imagine alternative worlds which take full and sensitive account of expanded ontological possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
Wikipedia, the free and open online encyclopedia, can serve as a case study of the challenges posed by the goals of 'inclusive innovation'. It is one major example for the realization of the expectations on new communication technologies and their democratizing potentials since it seeks to dismantle barriers in the production and reception of knowledge by implementing new socio-technical features. It is also one major example for the efforts of a vast group of distributed editors trying to secure the ideal of openness, which is the project's specific 'semantic formula' for describing its inclusionist agenda.
In my talk I will draw on findings of an ethnographic case study of German Wikipedia to present two aspects relevant to a critical discussion of inclusive innovation. First, I will present typical elements of Wikipedia's discourse of inclusion, with special focus on the role which is attributed to the technology. Second, with reference to Wikipedia's current problem of slowing growth in active editors I will outline typical challenges posed to the practical implementation of the inclusive goals of knowledge-creation communities. As Wikipedia is faced by increasing processes of closure, it is, again, urged to develop new strategies in order to contest those growing exclusionary tendencies within. The talk will conclude with an attempt to assess the effectiveness of technological features, diverse actors as well as communicative and normative resources which are mobilized to solve this very recent problem.
Paper long abstract:
Though largely forgotten now, Technology Networks were community-based prototyping workshops supported by the Greater London Council from 1983 until 1986. The aim was to bring together the 'untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm' in local communities with the 'reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge' in London's polytechnics. The workshops emerged out of a movement for socially useful production committed to more democratic forms of innovation.
Recalling the radical roots and conflicted experiences of the workshops brings to the fore issues still relevant today in critical debates about inclusive innovation:
• Tensions between prototyping activities for new business development, as distinct from more critical 'technological agit prop' mobilising against prevailing institutions of innovation;
• Working at equitable relations between codified, professionalised expertise and tacit, experiential skills in communities; and
• Uneasy workshop relations with prevailing political and economic structures versus wider movement aims for economic alternatives.
As such, the Technology Network experience addresses the session questions. Whilst ultimately unsuccessful in their overall aims, Technology Networks nevertheless advanced and reshaped a number of progressive technoscientific objects, methodologies and practices; from remanufacturing initiatives, to participatory design, to campaigns against fuel poverty (Q1). The experience also made apparent the cultural, economic and political bases of exclusion, and the sheer amount of dedicated work needed to realise meaningful forms of inclusion (Q2). Such issues, interpreted through careful historical contextualisation, beg critical questions of policy discussions of inclusive innovation today, but also radical aspirations in FabLabs, Hackerspaces and other community workshops today.
Paper long abstract:
In recent times of crises, innovation has been recognised as a critical response to multiple social and economic challenges. However, innovation has often been criticised as a narrow techno-scientific project aiming at profit maximisation (Felt et al. 2007). Such understandings are also manifested in the more recent Europe 2020 Innovation Union (2010; 2013) in which ideas of 'inclusion' are also reduced to the potential of innovations to contribute to economic growth. Thus, innovations evolve into 'conservative projects' (Suchman and Bischop, 2000), or top-down practices of exclusion whose orchestration is limited to the participation of specific 'innovators', while marginalising the role of other networks or communities in such processes (Felt et al. 2007).
Inspired by above critiques, this paper aims to contribute to re-thinking innovation in a more 'inclusive' way. Drawing on the LIVEABLE CITIES and the FAAN projects, it focuses on a diversity of small-scale, bottom-up projects of collective experimentation involved in alternative mobility and agro-food practices (e.g. car-sharing, community food growing, co-ops, etc.). By employing the political economic discourse of the moral economy (Sayer, 2000; 2006), it aims to unfold the multiple inclusive angles of innovation: a. involving a wider set of actors, b. going beyond a narrow technocentric and econocentric understanding of innovation, c. addressing wider societal goals of inclusion, cohesion and equalities. Thus, it aims to suggest an alternative conceptualisation of 'inclusive innovation' that can lie in the moral economy of such initiatives, as well as the wider sets of symbolic meanings and values attributed to them.