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Paper short abstract

What makes a constraint generative rather than merely domesticated? Drawing on two Responsible Innovation case studies and a narrative approach, this paper develops an initial theorization of hard and soft constraints and the narrative work they enable or foreclose.

Paper long abstract

What makes a constraint generative rather than merely domesticated? This paper approaches this question through two empirical vignettes drawn from prior Responsible Innovation case studies. In an Ethics-by-Design (EbD) collaboration, a dominant 'ethics toolbox' narrative framed ethical considerations as ready-made tools to be applied, fabricating the illusion of hard constraints while foreclosing more transformative engagements. In a chemistry lab, the phrase "there is no business case for this" operated as a seemingly hard constraint, closing off entire research directions while presenting an economic limit as a quasi-factual given.

These vignettes raise a broader theoretical question: is every constraint equally malleable? This paper proposes to think through the continuity and difference between soft constraints, such as EbD and SSbD frameworks that offer language and framing, harder yet constructed constraints, such as "there is no business case for this", and material constraints, such as planetary boundaries. What lends the latter a resistance that softer constraints seem to lack? And does that resistance make them more generative?

Yet STS has long taught us that hardness is not given but constructed and implemented. What then makes a constraint hard in practice, and what kinds of narrative work does that hardness enable or foreclose? Building on ongoing empirical and theoretical work on narrative infrastructure, this paper develops an initial theorization of how constraints of different registers enter the laboratory, contributing to STS debates on how limits might be inhabited as conditions of possibility rather than mere obstacles.

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Paper short abstract

Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) sets safety and sustainability upfront as design requirements for chemical innovation. However, the heterogeneity within SSbD research communities keeps these requirements as constraints rather than generative conditions for innovation and sociotechnical change.

Paper long abstract

Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) is a framework for stimulating a transition towards safer and more sustainable chemicals. By setting safety and sustainability as upfront design requirements for chemical innovation, SSbD can spawn a new wave of chemicals, materials, and products that promote a more resilient future and regenerative chemical industry. In this vision of SSbD, safety, sustainability, and design are concepts mobilised as “productive constraints” for innovation, requiring cross- and interdisciplinary collaboration across a variety of stakeholders and research communities. SSbD is often understood as a sequence of assessments that seamlessly combine methods and tools from different disciplines. In practice, however, the interaction and collaboration between them does not easily come about, raising questions about the effectiveness and stability of SSbD for building a more resilient future. In this paper, we examine (1) to what extent a new epistemic repertoire (Ankeny & Leonelli, 2016) is forming from interdisciplinary collaboration in the nascent SSbD research community, and (2) how SSbD’s concepts act as constraints or generative elements in forming productive capacities for the research community. We draw on surveys, interviews, fieldwork, and first-hand experience as socio-technical researchers embedded in an SSbD consortium. By analysing the repertoire around SSbD, we identify the epistemic, social, and material elements that converge around it and show how the mobilisation of these elements keeps safety, sustainability, and design as objects of contestation or of compromise for socio-technical change. Finally, we reflect on how SSbD can become a generative and productive program for reimaging technoscience.

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Paper short abstract

Studies have largely overlooked the processes in which carbonisation takes place as both technical, environmental, social and political processes. We develop the terminology centres of carbonisation to zoom in on how responsibility, power, guilt and agency are practically distributed differently.

Paper long abstract

In last decades, solutions to increasing carbon emissions have largely developed within a techno-optimistic frame. While we have witnessed a decade of ‘acting’ on mitigating the consequences of climate change, emissions keep increasing globally. The paradox of increased climate action and increasing carbon emissions calls for reflection of the research methodologies with which we attend to climate change across a range of empirical domains.

STS scholars have ethnographically unfolded and demonstrated the limits and potential of technological solutions; however, we argue that STS, especially using ethnographic methods, has the potential to attend to emissions and thereby also to the limitations needed to enable change. While decarbonisation has emerged as a stable term referring to the societal processes actively decreasing overall carbon emissions, studies have largely overlooked the processes in which carbonisation takes place as both technical, environmental, social and political processes.

Drawing on field studies on fossil fuel divestment and renewable energy investments, we develop the terminology centres of carbonisation, with attention to how responsibility, power, guilt and agency are differently distributed between and certainly beyond the individual and the government. The relations at play must be attended to with a lens of effects and distributive causality. The framework can be seen as a way that STS can limit itself, and thereby also foster analytical practices that can attend to questions of differentiation by asking: who are contributing to emissions, and who can limit them?

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Paper short abstract

As road maintenance consumes vast amounts of energy and materials, the limitation of its ecological consequences calls for infrastructural de-growth. This article draws on empirical research to explore the related institutional challenges and the possible contributions of STS to decision-making.

Paper long abstract

Road policies in the global North have been criticized for relying on extractivist economies: even as networks reach advanced stages of development, their maintenance depends on flows of materials extracted in the global South (Magalhães et al. 2019), with destructive consequences notably in the form of soil artificialization (Béchet et al. 2017). Specialized debates have started addressing constraining measures based on quantitative limitations. However, the legitimacies of different institutions to organize such limitations remain disputed.

This article explores possible contributions of STS in this matter, building on a twofold empirical research conducted in France as part of a line of work concerned with the institutional aspects of infrastructure maintenance (Denis and Florentin 2019). Firstly, based on an ongoing investigation started in 2019 with various public and private organisms involved in debates on the management of local roads, I show how certain framings of public policy assessment hinder the implementation of limitations (Solé-Pomies 2025) while other problematizations align more favorably—notably as budgetary constraints and climate risks play in favor of fewer paved roads. Secondly, I present a research protocol currently in the making that aims to systematically explore the forms of liberations fostered by limitations in road policies, while taking into account the challenges and resources needed at three interrelated levels: in technical departments of local administrations; in participatory procedures able to overcome the antagonism between territorial development and environmental policies; and in forms of expertise and research required to equip these procedures, either in the social, environmental, or engineering sciences.

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Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on a collaboration between a group of chemists from a low-tech lab and an (invited) STS scholar who together aimed to open up scientific practices by taking a collectively limited (degrowth) future into account during agenda-setting and experimentation.

Paper long abstract

The production of steel starts by the reduction of iron oxide into metallic iron, a reaction which is in most cases performed with large volumes of coal. Decarbonization scenarios for steel propose to use electricity or green hydrogen, typically maintaining or expanding current scale of production. A group of French chemists, self-identifying as a low-tech lab, decided to refuse this hegemonic socio-technic imaginary of green growth. Instead, they turned to STS and degrowth scholars that question the inevitability of such imaginaries, and advocate for reduction of energy and material use, toward steady-state economies. Soon realizing that it remains an open question how to rethink and reorganize natural sciences when one refuses economic growth as a driver of research and innovation, they turned to a befriended STS researcher for collaboration on the issue how to orient, execute and justify a chemical research practice within socio-ecological boundaries.

In this presentation I, the invited STS researcher, share some of the intricate results - it is possible to produce iron with solar energy and mammal urine, instead of coal or other fuels, and this forces us to rethink scalability as a techno-economic criterion for innovation - and I will reflect on the interdisciplinary process which I provisionally dub 'invitational sts': the fruits of responding to requests from natural scientists who are keen to politicize and open up disciplinary science, for which prior informal engagement - 'hanging out' and going odd places together - and shared normative orientations towards (limited) futures proved to be key.