Paper short abstract:

How does the buzzword “responsible research and innovation” enter researchers’ practices? We develop the notion of narrative infrastructures to understand how Austrian life scientists address and silence responsibility in speaking about their practice.

Paper long abstract:

Does the buzzword "responsible research and innovation" actually manage to enter researchers' practices? And if so, does it offer them a meaningful way to conceptualize being responsible, and how does it interact with other ways of framing responsibility?

We will use a narrative approach to better grasp how researchers (can) make sense of this discursive move and when and how they (can) turn it into practice. We see narratives not only as a way of sharing meaning in practice, but also as participating in the constitution of a broader sense of direction and purpose, of reconfiguring individual and institutional identities, and of enabling and constraining researchers' actions.

Our paper uses interviews and discussions with researchers from the life sciences in Austria as empirical basis. We will analyse how researchers address or silence responsibility, and which narrative infrastructures they draw on in doing so. The notion of infrastructure alerts us not only to the multiple levels and forms of narratives inherent to practices, but points to their interaction and to the effects of stabilisation. Is there a coherent "narrative infrastructure of responsibility" produced and circulated by policy makers, media, institutional actors and researchers alike, in which values and imaginaries of good research and its relation to society can circulate? Or do researchers draw on different narrative resources in addressing or silencing responsibility? .

This talk is prepared in the framework of a newly founded Research Platform "Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice" at the University of Vienna.