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Short abstract

This paper examines movement and mobility in embedded ethics work. As embedded STS researcher in a European research consortium, I analyse moving practices that enact embeddedness and show how movement co-produce the methodological and institutional conditions in which embedded ethics operates.

Long abstract

In Europe, many STS scholars are embedded in large technoscientific projects with a mandate to integrate ethical and societal dimensions into research practices. In doing so, they often move between actors across countries, disciplines, publics and imagined futures in order to foster ethical reflexivity and societal engagement with technology development. Several approaches and frameworks have focused on working with technical experts in their everyday research practices and expanding their capacity to integrate ethical considerations from within. A growing scholarship has expanded these frameworks across diverse technological domains and empirical settings. Moreover embedded ethics scholars have also reflected on their roles, methodological choices, limits and challenges involved in doing embedded ethics work. However, less attention has been paid to how embedded scholars move within and across the institutional and infrastructural arrangements (international research consortia) through which ethics is integrated into technoscientific practice and how these structures co-produce (im)mobility of the scholars themselves and the actors they seek to engage. Embeddedness is often enacted through the movement of people and many embedded ethics approaches often rely on particular forms of mobility, yet movement is generally assumed to be feasible or a logistical concern. Drawing on my involvement as a non-EU STS researcher in a European cancer research consortium, I examine my movements and problematise moving practices in integrating ethics in technoscientific projects and show how embeddedness is enacted through movement of actors. I argue for critical attention to how movement co-produces the material and institutional conditions that make embedded ethics work possible.