Paper short abstract:

How social scientists negotiate roles within synthetic biology research projects shapes the enactment of responsibility in this field. I consider several ways in which we adopt the role of ‘wife’ within synthetic biology and examine how responsibility for implementing RRI practices is distributed.

Paper long abstract:

Sociologists of science have themselves played a significant role in the adoption of 'responsible research and innovation' (RRI) as a discourse through which to encourage synthetic biology research projects in the UK to embed social scientists. The result is that RRI increasingly dominates as the ethical framework through which our presence must continually be justified. How we negotiate our roles in this mess of social, political, industrial, technical and material relations, and with what outcomes, is important to the enactment of the field, or not, as a responsible technoscience within governance, university and public engagement practices. My everyday work of managing collaborative relations in an RRI team, embedded in a synthetic biology research centre, forms one empirical basis for this paper, which I supplement with observations of and reports on the experiences of several colleagues in similar research centres in the UK. After briefly outlining some of the existing research on the roles of social scientists in synthetic biology, I develop this literature by describing several ways in which we have come to inhabit the role of 'wife'. I show how the relations assembled in the field help to construct particular forms of responsibility and close-down other possibilities.