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Modelling as anticipation: how computational models stabilize ideas of risk governance

Tue, August 18, 3:00 to 4:40pm CEST (3:00 to 4:40pm CEST), virPrague, VR 04

Abstract

Nanotechnology has served as a showcase for new, reflexive approaches of anticipatory governance, including RRI. However, in practice, formalized risk analysis still largely draws on traditional scientific perceptions of an objective calculation of hazards and exposures. Such closing down of risk assessment has been widely problematized by both STS and risk governance practitioners.
In this presentation, we focus on a recent development in anticipatory nano risk governance, i.e. computer-assisted assessment methods that are increasingly combined and integrated into comprehensive modelling frameworks, bringing together risk assessment and safe(r) innovation.

Based on expert interviews and key documents relating to selected modelling tools developed in EU projects, we reconstruct how understandings of risks and risk governance are being negotiated between science and policy when developing and conducting computer-assisted risk assessment. We are especially interested in moments of openness and closure and how these may be introduced in such negotiations.

We first explore opportunities for openness built in such modelling tools, on a technical (e.g. categories within models) as well as a conceptual level (life cycle thinking, safe-by-design). We will then discuss the implications of such extensions with regard to actors and stakeholders to be involved in such modelling activities, before finally reflecting on how integrative modelling tools contribute to a stabilization or re-configuration of ideas of risk governance as a technocratic vis-à-vis reflexive venture.

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