Critique as Intervention: Questioning the Research/Impact Divide

• In Event: Questioning Intervention with and within Science and Technology Studies: A Roundtable

Abstract

The interventionist impulse in STS is grounded in an understanding that sees science and technology as historically situated practices that embed power relations and values, creating, reproducing and potentially challenging social order. This understanding was developed and put in place through several decades of scholarship, which can itself be re-articulated as a series of interventions into the intellectual fabric of modern societies. Building on this inversion, we raise and discuss questions such as: What are the conditions of possibility for an interventionist STS? How can the epistemological commitments and methodological resources that make up the STS canon be mobilized in STS interventions, and how do they transform as they move from theory to practice? What is the performativity of STS interventions—in the stabilization of definitions, the creation of technoscientific fields, and the normalization of speculative promises? How does the uptake of STS knowledge in public discourse—for example, via the concept of responsible research and innovation or the diffusion of public engagement exercises—change public consciousness around science and technology?

Authors

• Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies

• Robert David Jonathan Smith, University of Nottingham

• Michael Bernstein, Arizona State University

• Stevienna de Saille, University of Sheffield

• Sean Low, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS)