STEP into the Future. Adventures in Technoscience Public Engagement in Australia

• In Event: Public Engagement in Science and Technology Policy 2

Abstract

In this paper, we will reflect on the STEP (Science & Technology Engagement Pathways) framework – a set of ‘best practice’ guidelines for public engagement - which was developed and tested by the Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research between 2010 and 2013, as part of a national strategy for ‘enabling’ technologies. The authors, both STS scholars, were involved in STEP as a public servant managing the program (Russell) and as an STS expert giving advice and participating (Marks).

Here, we consider STEP as a technology that sought to assemble actors, issues, understandings and conversations in new arrangements within a largely indifferent context. We trace the things that needed to be assembled and cared for in order to create and stabilise STEP. We consider the tenuous position of STEP, its marginal position in a policy ‘side room’ (Marks & Russell 2015), its ultimate demise; and how this fragile and delicate position influenced, negatively and positively, what it was able to perform.

We will try, in this paper, to uncover aspects of the co-production of STEP and the policy and technoscientific developments surrounding it, including by looking at how things have played out since. We will go on to consider what is left of STEP, who still cares, and whether this is enough for it to be re-assembled, to re-emerge with a different life. What place might STEP have amongst emerging imaginaries and participatory storylines? How might it translate and transgress its national boundaries?

Marks, N. & Russell, A.W. (2015) Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 97-115
Russell, A.W. (2013) Review of Policy Research, 30 (5): 566-587

Authors

• Alice Wendy Russell, Australian National University

• Nicola J Marks, University of Wollongong