Pluralising Progress: Making the Case for Counter (Sociotechnical) Imaginaries

• In Event: What is Innovation for Social Inclusion? I

Abstract

This study critically examines the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009) that have guided nuclear policy making in Brazil, and pastoral development in the Horn of Africa. We argue that the imaginaries in which each of these processes are embedded have been based on a view of progress as a predetermined linear advance to the future. A consequence of this, has been the reduction of complex issues to binary oppositions between support or opposition to a single ‘supposedly unique’ pathway to the future (Stirling, 2009). Here, discussion is admissible only around the ‘pace and scale’ of the particular privileged direction for advance. Such simplifications, seek to drown out, and ultimately exclude, those voices that run contrary to the incumbent narrative and promote alternative pathways. Fraser (1990) proposes that those excluded from influence form ‘subaltern counter-publics’ which generate counter-discourses. By building on Jasanoff and Kim, we develop the concept of counter-imaginaries as a means to explore the alternative pathways for change illuminated by these counter-publics. In doing so, we seek to move beyond the simple dichotomies that have previously been so dominant in these fields. Ultimately by ‘pluralising progress’ (Stirling, 2011), we seek to demonstrate by reference to concrete examples that a diversity of new pathways, previously blinkered from sight, can come into view.

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Fraser, N., 1990. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Soc. Text 56–80.

Jasanoff, S. and Kim, S.-H., 2009. Containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva , 47, 119–146

Stirling, Andrew (2009) Direction, distribution and diversity! pluralising progress in innovation, sustainability and development. Working Paper. STEPS Centre.

Stirling, Andrew (2011) Pluralising progress: From integrative transitions to transformative diversity. Journal of Environmental Innovation & Societal Transitions, 1 (1). pp.82-88.

Authors

• Yusuf Dirie, SPRU, University of Sussex

• Ana Paula Camelo, State Universty of Campinas