Innovation Under Fire: Shifting Imaginaries of Science, Technology and Society Governance – I

Abstract

Fueled by recent shifts towards more techno-pessimist framings of socio-technical futures, “Ethics and Society” has become a cornerstone of science and technology governance in recent years. The new rise of “Ethics and Society” is not only visible in emerging national and global policy frameworks (e.g. RRI, Co-Creation), but increasingly also in the private sector, where the creation of ethics boards and guidelines is becoming paramount for legitimizing the interruptions caused by new knowledge and technologies. Yet, discourses and practices around the alignment of innovation and society produce their own logic, in which the integration of societal and ethical ‘concerns’ seems to sit comfortably among ongoing imaginaries of technological fixes. Particularly in governance settings whose core rationale has so long been nourished by techno-optimism (e.g. Silicon Valley, Venture Capital, Tech start-ups, the World Economic Forum), the institutionalization of ethical and societal expertise provides new avenues for regenerating visions of progress mediated by socially aligned innovations.

This panel puts the new rise of “Ethics and Society” in science and technology governance front and center: Which role do novel discourses and practices for aligning innovation and “Society” play in generating and regenerating socio-technical futures?

We seek to better understand the cultures, contexts, and institutions that foster the co-production of emerging technologies and normative orders in novel ways, giving rise to new imaginaries of the relationship between innovation and society.

Chair

• Maciej Kuziemski, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

Discussant

• Pierre-Benoit Joly, Lisis

Individual Presentations

• Ethics and Society in Global Governance: Imaginaries of Ethicalization and Democratization in the Production of a New Governance Regime - Nina María Frahm, Technical University Munich, Munich Center for Technology in Society

• Division of Expert Advisory Labour in Biotech Governance: Regulating Cloned Food in the European Union - Alessandro Allegra, UCL STS

• The Social Pathways of Emerging Technologies: An Ethnographic Case Study of a Chemical Manufacturing Company - Penny Polson, University of Manchester

Session Organizers

• Maciej Kuziemski, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex

• Nina María Frahm, Technical University Munich, Munich Center for Technology in Society

• Kasper Hedegaard Schiølin, Harvard STS Program, Harvard Kennedy School