Short Abstract

The panel explores how thinking with innovation residues—the material, infrastructural, and epistemic left-behinds of innovations—can disrupt and reassemble imaginaries of innovation societies. We invite contributions that engage empirically/conceptually/normatively with this change of perspective.

Description

What would happen—conceptually, methodologically, normatively, and practically—if we started to think about innovation through its left-behinds? This is the overarching question at the centre of the proposed panel. We invite contributors to think with the conceptual lens of “innovation residues” in re-considering what hegemonic innovation discourses and their accompanying institutional arrangements tend to omit, and how engaging with residues might disrupt dominant imaginaries of innovation societies and reassemble them in new ways.

We understand innovation residues as the dispersed, delayed, often (deliberately) invis-ibilized, elusive, and difficult-to-categorize left-behinds of the contemporary imperative to innovate (Felt, 2025). They appear in multiple forms:

(a) material residues—the tangible remnants of innovation practices such as microplas-tics, PFAS, and other toxic chemicals dispersed through the environments (Boudia et al., 2018), or radioactive waste;

(b) infrastructural residues—abandoned or ruinated buildings and spatialities that once enabled innovation but lost their purpose, such as now-derelict nuclear power plants (Pottin & Felt, 2025) or closed-down data centres (Brodie & Velkova, 2021); and

(c) epistemic residues—ingrained yet problematic thought patterns (e.g., hegemonic innovation discourses, related governance logics, or techno-solutionism (Morozov, 2013)) that persist in constraining alternative ways of thinking.

These residues generate novel challenges of governance, responsibility, and care. They raise questions of (environmental) justice, of dominant societal values, and of the ’past futures’ that underpin imaginaries of socio-technical development. In doing so, they trouble, disrupt, and open possibilities to reassemble understandings of innovation and innovation societies and challenge established approaches to responsible innovation.

We invite contributions that engage empirically, conceptually, methodologically, or nor-matively with this theme: case studies of material, infrastructural, or epistemic residues; reflections on how innovation residues can serve as an analytical lens for re-thinking and reassembling innovation societies; and interventions that challenge, disrupt, or re-imagine existing models of responsible innovation.

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