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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?