Innovation in Itself and Innovation for Itself: A Topological Approach to Some Performances of Subalternity in Innovation Practices, the Case of Sardinia

• In Event: Towards Sustainability - II: Exploring Paths for Transformative Socio-technical Change in the Bioeconomy and Natural Resources Management (Agriculture, Aquaculture and Food Production)

Abstract

Studying socio-technical processes in Sardinia needs to consider the rôle of politics of innovation in discourse and in socio-technical practices, using ideology and the production of actual operating classifications. In spite of being part of the Italian state - and of the Global North - Sardinia is a marginal area and it has been considered a target for “development policies” and “politics of innovation”, being characterized, in master narratives, by backwardness and its own people’s traditional behavior. This borderland condition helps to consider the contemporary presence of socio-technical processes not very different both from the Global North and from the Global South, which is also a widespread overlapping, present in many other realities.
Starting from four case studies about local innovation practices, we aim to show how, in peripheries, power and political stances are important to settle socio-technical processes as innovation throughout a classification of entities and the performance of subalternity. We aim also to show how the design practices, in established innovation companies or places, constitute an actual divide between innovation as mere socio-technical change (innovation in itself) and “innovation” as socio-techno-discoursive construction (innovation for itself). The framing strength of “innovation” as a concept and ideologeme, and as policies, help to better consider the marginalization of articulation, maintenance and repair, resistance, and the disdain of multinaturality, as an important tool in order to perform the subalternity within the socio-technical processes and in particularly the “innovation” ones.

Author

• Alessandro Mongili, Università degli Studi di Padova