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- Convenors:
-
Hannot Rodríguez
(University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU)
Sergio Urueña (University of La Laguna)
Oihana Iglesias-Carrillo (University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU)
David-Álvaro Martínez (University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
The panel aims to explore and assess how hegemonic normative frameworks operating within goal-oriented research policies fix which socio-technical futures are considered plausible and desirable, thereby constraining the directionalities and governance dynamics that shape research and innovation.
Description
Research policies have been reoriented towards addressing socio-environmental challenges (e.g., fighting climate change or advancing cancer research). Within the European Union this approach is articulated and reproduced, among others, in the so-called Lund Declaration (2009), and converges with other initiatives such as the United Nations' SDGs.
These challenge-oriented initiatives underpinning science policy constitute and express normative frameworks that define and fix certain futures as both desirable and plausible. In the name of such futures, the EU advocates for alternative modes of doing science and technology, which, however, are not always genuinely transformative. For example, while calls are made for more socio-epistemically inclusive forms of research and innovation—e.g., more inter- and transdisciplinary or socially participatory—the signifiers, meanings, and institutionalized practices associated with these normative frameworks tend to constrain the scope and character of such transformations.
The panel aims to explore and assess how hegemonic normative frameworks—those that articulate and stabilize certain desirable (and plausible) futures towards which science and technology are expected to be headed to—constrain and, at the same time, are themselves constrained by the directionalities and governance dynamics that shape research and innovation.
Panel questions and topics include, but are not limited to:
-What are the normative frameworks that, across different geographical and institutional contexts, condition and constrain science and technology?
-How do these frameworks operate in shaping the directionalities and modalities of research and innovation, and how do they fix what counts as desirable and plausible futures? To whom do these futures belong—and whom do they benefit or harm?
-How do scientific-technological practices themselves act to condition and delimit the sociotechnical horizons deemed desirable and plausible?
-What kinds of methods can be mobilized to identify, assess, and transform these normative frameworks and their associated scientific-technological practices? How might we engage with the futurity towards which such frameworks and sociotechnical dynamics orient us?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
RRI promotes a forward-looking responsibility for which the future is qualitatively different from the present. Open Science supports a restricted view of responsibility in which the future is an empty space waiting to be filled. The talk critically compares the futures of the two policies.
Paper long abstract
Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a science governance framework supported by the European Commission’s (EC) funding program Horizon2020 (2013-2020). RRI promotes an expanded conception of social responsibility for science, which goes beyond harm prevention and can be described as a form of ‘remedial responsibility’. Both preventionist and remedial responsibility are kinds of forward-looking responsibilities (as opposed to the backward-looking, post hoc assignment of blame and punishment). However, they rely on different conceptions of the future. Specifically, the kind of responsibility promoted by RRI require a future that is not qualitatively indistinguishable from the present, like an ‘empty’ reality waiting to be filled with the passing of time. Instead, it requires a form of ‘lived future’, in which many things (i.e., our value systems) may be qualitatively different from the present.
With the transition to the new funding program, HorizonEurope (2021-2027), reference to ‘responsibility’ in research and innovation has disappeared and EC now supports Open Science (OS). OS does not seem to require the kind of critical and future-oriented reflection necessary to social responsibility. Furthermore, OS seems to reduce scientists’ responsibility to the production and diffusion of knowledge (‘epistemic responsibility’), which requires only an ‘empty’ conception of the future.
In this talk, I reconstruct the shift from RRI to OS and I diagnose the main problems with the new overall governance strategy of the EC.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines competing normative frameworks shaping responsibility in EU science, technology and innovation policy. It analyses tensions between the “principle of innovation” and the “principle of democratisation”, and their implications for governing sociotechnical futures.
Paper long abstract
The European Union’s science, technology, and innovation (STI) policy is subject to a series of unresolved tensions regarding how responsibility is conceived and governed. Drawing on an analysis of key strategic documents, this paper identifies two competing set of approaches to responsibility. The first, categorised as the “principle of innovation”, emphasises the promotion of strategic autonomy, competitiveness, and the accelerated deployment of technologies. The second, referred to here as the “principle of democratisation” and associated with more transformative interpretations of normative proposals such as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) or Open Science, seeks to foster more inclusive and deliberative STI processes. The paper highlights four key features of the relationship between these two principles: i) their tense coexistence is rooted in a fundamental ideological divergence; ii) both share a critique of the dominant risk-based governance logic, albeit from opposing motivations and normative frameworks and commitments; iii) the “principle of innovation” consistently prevails over the “principle of democratisation”; and iv) the institutional assumption that inherently conflicting goals (e.g. economic growth and sustainability) can coexist harmoniously reinforces the “principle of innovation” at the expense of the “principle of democratisation”. These tensions illuminate how hegemonic normative stances within EU STI policy—which are close to the “principle of innovation”—stabilise particular socio-technical futures as desirable and plausible, while marginalising alternative trajectories centred on democratic participation and reflexive governance. It is argued that a democratic governance of STI requires acknowledging and directly confronting these tensions.
Paper short abstract
While recognizing that goal-oriented programs narrow desirable futures, we argue portfolio-level assembling of data infrastructures and funded projects can expand what policy monitoring can see and act on, reopening the range of futures that can be treated as plausible, as the EU AgData illustrates.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how mission-oriented research programs fix the conditions under which evidence and innovation can be recognized—and how that same architecture can also expand the futures that policy monitoring can see and pursue.
Taking the EU “Agriculture of Data” (AgData) Partnership as its empirical case, the paper traces how the EU’s normative frameworks for agri-food digital transformation are encoded in a pre-established activity catalogue that defines what counts as relevant research and innovation for both agricultural production and policy monitoring. A use-case centered program structure then translates these priorities into concrete tasks anchored in both on-the-ground agricultural utility and policy-evidence generation. Together, these mechanisms act as gatekeeping thresholds into a governance assemblage (Li, 2007) that embeds its normative vision of what agri-food futures are worth pursuing, narrowing what approaches should be recognized from the outset (Stirling, 2008).
The paper's central claim, however, is that this narrowing is not the whole story. When projects produce evidence in isolation, what lies outside their individual frameworks remains invisible. By contrast, when data infrastructures and funded projects are coordinated at the portfolio level—mapped onto a shared portfolio framework and aligned through interoperable standards—policy monitoring can see and act on a wider set of phenomena, broadening the range of futures that can subsequently be treated as plausible.
The paper draws on participant observation in AgData steering committee meetings, work package task leader meetings, and funded project coordination sessions, combined with documentary analysis of AgData's core partnership and operational texts.
Paper short abstract
Following the German bioeconomy framework, this research investigates networked responsibility relationships and the associated practices in the context of a regional transformation. We identify politics of networks and show how hegemonic frameworks crystalize into practices on a regional scale.
Paper long abstract
For nearly two decades, the conceptual idea of bioeconomy has travelled into normative frameworks on different levels of international, European and national governance. In order to address the various societal, technological and environmental challenges of current times, bioeconomy frameworks aim to operationalize scientific-technological vehicles leading to novel, circular value chains based on biogenic, recycled and residual raw materials. Following the latest German Bioeconomy Strategy of 2020, the regional implementation of an emerging bioeconomy gained traction by accessing funding programs and new governance initiatives faclitating regional societal and industrial transformations. This case study investigates how regional actors of the German Rhenish Lignite Area, currently facing the phase-out of lignite mining, take on responsibility (or not) to transform economic practices and allow bioeconomy emergence. More specifically, we apply the theoretical framework of networked responsibility relationships outlined by Stahl (2022, 2023, 2024) as a scheme to delineate the imagined practices and further explore how these practices support, restrict, or shape the emergence of a bioeconomy itself. On the basis of qualitative interviews, we gathered empirical data across various regional actors from fields of governance, research and industry over a period of three years. We identify different mechanisms of responsibility ascriptions leading to imagined and enacted politics of networks and how these responsibilities contribute to the emergence of a bioeconomy in the Rhenish Lignite Area. Our research shows how top-down approaches of a hegemonic normative framework, such as bioeconomy, crystalize into practices based on networked responsibility relationships.
Keywords: bioeconomy, networked responsibility relationships, transformation
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates the directionality of scientific-technological practices, by tracing epistemic imaginaries. These are defined as textual or visual representations of an ideal set of future achievements within a research field. The cases are plasma chemistry and neurodegeneration research.
Paper long abstract
Typically, science and innovation policy aim to guide research directions by offering funding and adding conditions. Often, however, disappointment follows when researchers behave opportunistically, by relabelling their research and by window dressing. This paper has another starting point and asks how directions in scientific-technological practices appear in the first place.
In this paper, I study the directionality of scientific-technological practices by tracing epistemic imaginaries: textual or visual representations of an ideal set of future achievements within a research field. Such future achievements range from ‘holy grails’ of the field to be awarded with a Nobel prize, to generic and mundane assessments of what, realistically, can be expected to be achieved in the near future. Epistemic imaginaries express the aspirational horizons by foregrounding the priorities of knowledge production or by suggesting something is impossible to achieve. I am interested in how these scientific agenda setting processes respond to societal demands and pressures such as an aging population or the climate crisis.
Theoretically, the paper bridges two STS perspectives: the sociology of expectations and studies on epistemic cultures. Empirically, I study the fields of plasma chemistry and neurodegeneration research (which includes studies on Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease). I have traced epistemic imaginaries by (i) interviewing researchers in the field, both established and newcomers; (ii) analysing review articles; (iii) studying agenda-building activities at conferences, such as programs, welcoming lectures, state-of-the-art overviews, (panel) discussions and award ceremonies. The paper concludes with insights into how epistemic imaginaries change, with pathways, stages and mechanisms.
Paper short abstract
This paper combines narrative analysis with fantasmatic logics to expose the affective grip that keeps hegemonic normative frameworks in place, even when they fail to deliver. An Ethics-by-Design project, studied through interviews and participant observation, serves as the primary case.
Paper long abstract
Concepts like Ethics-by-Design (EbD) and Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) have gained traction as vehicles for embedding ethical and social considerations into research and innovation. Backed by European policy frameworks, they function as hegemonic normative frameworks that define desirable futures and prescribe how science and technology ought to get there. Yet their transformative potential is rarely self-evident in practice (e.g. Gogoll et al., 2021; Tigard et al., 2023), and what remains underexplored is why these frameworks prove so resilient even when they fail to deliver.
This paper introduces a new analytical move: extending narrative analysis with Glynos and Howarth's fantasmatic logics (Glynos & Howarth, 2007) to expose the affective grip holding hegemonic framings in place (Glynos, 2021). Understanding narrative infrastructures as collectively maintained networks of storylines organized through dominant metaphors (Deuten & Rip, 2000; Ampe & Goeminne, forthcoming), we argue that such infrastructures are sustained not by narrative coherence alone, but also by fantasmatic investments that may render alternatives difficult to pursue.
We develop this argument through a narrative inquiry into a three-year interdisciplinary EbD collaboration between software engineers and SSH scholars. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, we illustrate how a dominant 'ethics toolbox' narrative infrastructure consolidated within the project, and how its staying power becomes more fully intelligible when its fantasmatic underpinnings are brought to light.
This paper focuses on EbD as a primary case, while situating the analysis within the first author's PhD research, which will further develop and apply this combined narrative-fantasmatic lens across research and innovation contexts.
Paper short abstract
AI in higher education is often framed as inevitable progress. Drawing on STS concepts of sociotechnical imaginaries and paradoxical infrastructure, my paper shows how techno-deterministic narratives constrain governance responses, producing regulatory ritualism rather than meaningful oversight.
Paper long abstract
Discourses surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education frequently frame the technology as an inevitable stage in the evolution of teaching and learning. This paper argues that such narratives function as hegemonic normative frameworks that constrain institutional and policy responses to AI. Rather than opening space for deliberation about alternative sociotechnical futures, the rhetoric of inevitability creates a narrow trajectory in which AI adoption is assumed to be both necessary and desirable.
Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), the paper conceptualises AI in higher education as a paradoxical infrastructure: a sociotechnical system that simultaneously promises efficiency, accessibility and innovation while generating tensions around academic integrity, educator autonomy, labour conditions and educational equity. These tensions are interpreted through competing sociotechnical imaginaries that frame AI as either transformative opportunity or existential threat.
Using qualitative document analysis of policy reports, academic literature and institutional materials relating to the Australian tertiary education sector, the paper examines how these imaginaries shape governance practices. The analysis demonstrates that techno-deterministic narratives of AI inevitability contribute to an environment of uncertainty in which universities adopt highly visible but often ineffective governance strategies. These practices resemble what Braithwaite et al (2007) describe as regulatory ritualism, where policy activity prioritises symbolic responsiveness over substantive regulatory transformation.
By situating AI governance within a debate about hegemonic normative frameworks in research and innovation policy, the paper shows how imagined technological futures delimit institutional decision-making and constrain possibilities for alternative trajectories in higher education.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the EU’s SRIA shapes nanomedicine innovation and how open participatory co-production processes may problematize and generate alternative socio-technical imaginaries, expanding innovation trajectories beyond its competitiveness-driven, industry-oriented agenda.
Paper long abstract
The last decades have seen the consolidation of nanomedicine as a global R&D&I sector within an organized and growing community. European policies fund research and translation, help structure value chains, and foster the emergence of an industrial and economic sector. In this context, the European Technology Platform for Nanomedicine (ETPN), through its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), defines the scope of nanomedicine in Europe until 2030 and sets research and innovation priorities. Its main objectives are to address unmet medical needs, combine nanotechnology with other key enabling technologies, integrate medical innovations into healthcare systems, and strengthen the global competitiveness of the European healthcare sector.
This paper analyzes the directionalities of innovation that both constrain and are constrained by the SRIA objectives for nanomedicine. The analysis draws on a two-year open participatory process for the co-production of nanoparticles for health applications. This participatory setting enables an examination of how strategic frameworks such as the SRIA may privilege particular socio-epistemic directions of scientific innovation over alternative ones. In this sense, the two-year co-production process was deliberately not oriented by predefined innovation objectives. Instead, it provided an open setting in which diverse publics could critically reflect on the ‘nano futures’ projected by dominant frameworks such as the SRIA and, more importantly, articulate alternative socio-technical imaginaries of their own through anticipatory co-creation practices. These imaginaries included prioritizing exploratory research on high-uncertainty diseases, patient epistemic agency, and open, accessible nanotechnology infrastructures, thereby expanding the range of innovation trajectories of SRIA’s competitiveness-driven, industry-oriented agenda.
Paper short abstract
Mission-oriented R&I policy presupposes a shared future. Yet retropolitical movements and AI-driven temporalities erode precisely this ground. Drawing on European foresight work, the paper asks which futures are stabilized or foreclosed as the future itself becomes a site of political contestation.
Paper long abstract
Mission-oriented research and innovation policies, from Horizon Europe missions and Transformative Innovation Policy to the SDGs, rest on a largely unexamined premise: that a shared orientation toward the future exists as common ground for political action and knowledge production. This paper argues that this premise is currently under severe strain. Two interrelated developments are destabilizing the future as collective reference point: the growing global power of retropolitical and retrotopian projects that deliberately displace forward-oriented imaginaries with backward-looking, particularist visions; and AI-driven temporalities that configure agency and novelty as optimization of the past, structured through historical data and algorithmic logics.
Building on critiques of mission-oriented innovation policy, which asked whether the paradigm was already captured by technology-push logics before it could become effective, this paper extends that critique: mission-oriented R&I policy risks not only internal capture by growth-oriented norms, but faces a deeper external legitimacy crisis. European foresight practices increasingly operate in a political environment where the idea of a shared, open future is attacked from multiple directions. The paper examines how these practices respond to or reproduce hegemonic normative frameworks under such conditions: which sociotechnical futures are stabilized and rendered actionable, which alternative directionalities are foreclosed, and whose futures are marginalized as retropolitical movements delegitimize universalist imaginaries.
The paper maps the tension between the proclaimed transformative ambitions of mission-oriented R&I policy and its actual epistemic and political effects under retropolitical pressure and asks whether this condition demands a fundamental reconceptualization of the relationship between research governance, foresight, and political imagination.
Paper short abstract
I will examine Amazon's SocialBot Grand challenge for the voice assistant Alexa, in which teh company invites university researchers to innovate alongside Amazon. Due to constrictive management and alignment towards Amazon's goals, I show how the resulting research is not transformative.
Paper long abstract
This paper investigates Amazon's SocialBot Grand challenge in the long standing research Alexa Prize Competition and asks whether the competitions' have failed as a framework for innovation.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with participants, the study examines how Amazon’s Platform Governance structures shape the conditions of Third-Party Developer Innovation and influence the everyday work of developing for the Alexa ecosystem. The analysis shows that Amazon’s emphasis on user satisfaction directs developer effort away from exploratory innovation and toward continuous maintenance and repair. These dynamics are reinforced by Amazon’s organizational processes, which establish evaluation, support, and oversight in ways that further limit Third-Party Developer Innovation. The findings reveal how the company’s Software Development Infrastructure simultaneously enables and constrains novelty, producing a culture of ‘good enoughness’ that stands in tension with the competition’s rhetoric of Silicon Valley exceptionalism.
The paper explores the question whether the research framework that has been tailored to produce research that is aligned with Amazon's goals is productive for creating transformative research. By investigating innovation at the cutting-edge of technology development in the tech industry, comparisons to public research can be drawn. Despite creating an effective niche for innovation, the frictions between research in industry and university lead to misalignment in motivations, which indicate that a need for flexibility in reserach frameworks is needed to counteract this.
Paper short abstract
Goal-oriented policies fix desirable visions while foreclosing others. Examining visions of "love technologies", we reveal theoretical blind spots that reproduce the injustice they aim to overcome, closing down a more inclusive intimacy. This opens space for negotiating alternative affective futures
Paper long abstract
In the EU’s research context, goal-oriented research policies, such as the UN SDGs, fix certain sociotechnical visions as desirable and plausible while foreclosing others. These goals enact socio-epistemic assemblages that prioritize innovation actors, political responsibilities, temporal horizons, and academic products (Lösch et al., 2017; Schneider et al., 2021). Consider, for instance, SDG 3 (health) and SDG 5 (gender equality), which shape which possibilities receive attention and funding while rendering others invisible.
Examining emerging visions on “love technologies” —from algorithmic matchmaking and sex robots to biochemical enhancers— we analyze how these frameworks close down possibilities for "affective justice". This debate is polarized between bioethical optimists who see these technologies as democratizing control over sexual well-being (Nyholm et al., 2023) and feminist pessimists who warn of commodification and surveillance of women (Illouz, 2020). A closer hermeneutical assessment reveals unexamined blind spots. First, dominant visions treat "love" as self-evident while each smuggles assumptions about "real" affective justice, failing to enable collective deliberation. Second, their research treats "technology" either as value-neutral or through linear user/device models (e.g., Courtois & Timmermans, 2018; Sayeras & Rueff-Lopes, 2025), failing to grasp entangled sociotechnical complexity.
These visions consolidate modal power (Fuller, 2018), reinforcing the hegemonic plausibility of "love" and "technology". The consequences are political: such frameworks ignore those who do not fit the amatonormative mold, foreclosing more inclusive technological developments for romantic relationships. These frameworks thus reproduce the exclusions they ought to overcome. Identifying these dynamics, however, opens a space for a transforming negotiation of alternative affective futures.
Paper short abstract
Understanding AI policy documents by international organisations as discursive infrastructure, this paper interrogates how such policies bring into being a specific reading of this technology, direct future investment, and thereby constrain the possibility of tackling the environmental crises.
Paper long abstract
As the environmental crises continue, the AI hype unfolds in business and policy circles. Previous literature suggests that environmental concerns beyond material infrastructure are largely absent from AI policy, and the risk and harm typologies used therein. Because policy documents establish a discursive infrastructure that brings the inscribed objects and relationships into being, this paper interrogates how environmental concerns are (re)presented (or missing) in international AI policy documents.
Drawing on eleven reports or policy documents by international organisations, we apply "critical whataboutism" to reconstruct understandings of AI, associated risks, problematisations, outlined solutions, imaginaries, and the way the documents distribute power and agency.
We find that beyond tokenistic referral to carbon emissions, only few policy documents consider wider environmental impacts; however, these documents still often hedge their own agency in order to conform to discourses of international competitiveness and to reap supposed efficiency gains associated with AI; in these cases, generalised and strategic ignorance as well as priorisation of societal goals appear to contribute to lacking consideration for the environment. Overall, maintaining (or reaching) competitiveness appears to be the main aim of the screened policy reports even for international organisations.
As in society at large, the position of the environmental crisis is unfortunately lost in the context of geopolitics, which all screened documents navigate. Our analysis provides opportunities to rethink "AI" and its relationship to environmental crises. It urges policy makers to write environmental crises "into being" so that they become part of the discursive infrastructure, also on AI.