Questioning Intervention with and within Science and Technology Studies: A Roundtable

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

STS understands science and technology as historically situated practices that embed power relations and values, creating, reproducing and potentially challenging social order. This understanding implies that science and technology could be done differently; create different kinds of order, accentuating, and distributing resources, capacities, and power in different ways. This opens up the possibility of actively seeking to change the course of science and technology—a course made and not found, which can be remade and reordered.
Against this background, STS scholars are increasingly seeking not just to deconstruct common understandings of science and technology, but also to generate alternative practices, purposes, governance systems and, ultimately, new knowledge that can direct scientific and technological development toward desirable futures. Changing the ideas, institutions, behaviours, and infrastructures that produce scientific and technological outcomes is becoming a core concern for the field, as embodied in the ‘making and doing’ session that is becoming a core feature of the conference. This move from analysis to intervention is spurred by increasing demands from funders and employers for ‘usable knowledge’ and for research to demonstrate ‘policy relevance’ and ‘impact’. Our roundtable discussion will focus on experiences with interventions, interrogating embedded understandings of what separates theory from practice, objectivity from normativity, facts from values, research from intervention, and critique from politics.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Michael Bernstein, Arizona State University

Individual Presentations

• Critique as Intervention: Questioning the Research/Impact Divide - 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)

• Intervention Inversions: A framework to understand existing practices - Michael Bernstein, Arizona State University; Robert David Jonathan Smith, University of Nottingham; Stefan Schäfer, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies; Shannon Spruit, Delft University of Technology; Eleanor Hadley Kershaw, Institute for Science & Society, University of Nottingham; sarah Hartley, University Of British Columbia; Rider W Foley, University of Virginia; Richard Rushforth, Northern Arizona University; Philip Boucher, University of Manchester; Andrew Chilvers, University College London; Lalitha Sundaram, University of Cambridge

• Delivering impact, steering science? Intervening in strategic research policy - Robert David Jonathan Smith, University of Nottingham; sarah Hartley, University Of British Columbia

• Science policy and zombie sensibility: Introducing scientists and engineers to science outside the lab - Michael Bernstein, Arizona State University

• Who is intervening in synthetic biology? - Lalitha Sundaram, University of Cambridge