Real-World Experiments for Knowledge Production

Abstract

This theme session furthers examination of ‘Real-World Experimentation’ as recursive, reflexive, and refractive processes that may produce more relevant and useful domains of scientific knowledge for different publics. We hope to engender conversations surrounding practices that may supplant spaces of ignorance with forms of deeply situated knowledges that resonate within the public sector in novel ways. These in-vivo spaces, co-created by humans and/or others, expand kinds of expertise, specifically, who can be an experimenter and who assigns validity and value to experimental results, opening the arena to creative ideas not conceptualized in more disciplinarily defined spaces. Additionally, the process of expanding the experimental method on-the-ground has the potential to inform theories and practices of doing social science in the public domain.

We seek empirically-grounded research and case-studies that intentionally engage public arenas such as field trials, community based participatory studies, citizen science, urban laboratories, and other inclusive and ‘open’ or ‘experimental’ domains of knowledge production through the exploration of new approaches to understanding ‘real-world’ complexities. We welcome presentations that consider questions such as: how can a variety of modes of applied experimentation be more clearly understood within the shaping of evolving knowledges? How do more contextually driven models of intervention produce, validate, and communicate technoscientific knowledge as public knowledge? What are expanding roles of co-designers, users, and other communities of practice within these complex and contextualized practices? How might modes of STS research re-define experimental criteria and engage iterative knowledge production to re-imagine outcomes as well as alternative social dynamics?

Chair

• Barbara Allen, Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus

Discussant

• Nona Schulte-Römer, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ

Individual Presentations

• Localizing Science: Creating, Legitimizing, and Distributing Knowledge in the Public Sphere - Maya Sanders, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Designing Blended Modes of Knowledge Production Inside the “Real-World” of Biosphere 2, 1991-1994 - Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

• An Experiment in Hybridizing Environmental Health Data for Community Empowerment and Policy Reach - Barbara Allen, Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus

• Crowd Research: From Resistance to Creating Alternative Influence Avenues. The Case of Mannitol and Parkinson’s - Shlomo Guzmen Carmeli, Dep't. of Sociology & Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University; David A. Rier, Bar-Ilan University

• Innovation Parliaments? Real-World Experiments and the Call for Constituting Social Settings Accordingly - Stefan Boeschen, Chair of Society and Technology RWTH Aachen University

Session Organizers

• Barbara Allen, Virginia Tech-National Capital Region Campus

• Matthias Gross, Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ

• Meredith Sattler, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo