Critical Participation: When Critique Includes Travel

• In Event: Making and Doing: Activating STS through Knowledge Expression and Travel - II

Abstract

How might we produce STS knowledge for travel? This paper explores some of the problematics. All of us likely have stories of disconnect between the settled demarcations we encounter and the alternative sociotechnical nominations we propose, as well as cases of overlapping sensibilities. I advocate "critical participation" – developing and expressing forms of STS knowledge that inflect some dominant form of knowledge without necessarily dismantling or wholly replacing it, producing flows of sociotechnical learning and reflexive sociotechnical learning. Four scholarly moves co-exist and interact, without clear or necessary sequence. (1) Theorizing sociotechnical dominance frames the hierarchical demarcations that traveling sociotechnical knowledge must confront and engage (for me, "dominant images"). (2) Following attachments of knowledge to knowers reveals knowledge hierarchies to live as knowledge-knower hierarchies, with sometimes surprising implications for scholars in and out of the field. (3) Translating sociotechnical contents into alternates produces learning by inflecting rather than erasing and replacing. (4) Enacting experiments in ecologies of performance tests how alternates critically engage dominance and produce return flows of sociotechnical learning (for me, via "infrastructuring"). I was asked to help "change the culture" of engineering (really?), but frame critical participation to fit other areas of STS scholarship as well. How can we effect the travel of STS knowledge via compositions of critical engagement and reflexive learning, recognizing the resilience of demarcations and knowledge hierarchies?

Author

• Gary Downey, Virginia Tech