Generative Critique in Interdisciplinary Collaborations: From Critique in and of the Neurosciences to Socio-Technical Integration Research as a Practice of Critique in R(R)I

Discourses on Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation, in short R(R)I, have revolved around but not elaborated on the notion of critique. In this article, generative critique is introduced to R(R)I as a practice that sits in-between adversarial armchair critique and co-opted, uncritical service. How to position oneself and be positioned on this spectrum has puzzled humanities scholars and social scientists who engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and other professionals. Recently, generative critique has been presented as a solution to the puzzle in interdisciplinary collaborations on neuroscientific experiments. Generative critique seeks to create connections across disciplines that help remake seemingly stable objects in moments when taken-for granted ways of seeing and approaching objects are unsettled. In order to translate generative critique from the neurosciences to R(R)I, socio-technical integration research (STIR) is proposed as a practice of generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. These collaborations aim to account for societal aspects in research and technology development. For this purpose, a variety of approaches have been developed, including STIR and video-reflexive ethnography (VRE). STIR and VRE resemble each other but diverge on affective, collaborative, and temporal dimensions. Their juxtaposition serves to develop suggestions for how STIR could be modified on these dimensions to better enact generative critique in interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations. In this way, the article contributes to ongoing discussions in R(R)I and in the engaged programme in science and technology studies more broadly on the dynamics of positioning in collaborative work

Why Does Controversy Persist? Paradigm Clash, Conflicting Visions, and Academic Productivity in the Aesthetics of Religion

The genre of controversy studies in Science & Technology Studies distinguishes between ‘internalist’ and ‘interactional’ controversies. Interactional controversy studies highlight that debates involving multiple stakeholders with competing interests often evade closure. Research on internalist controversies focuses on how a ‘core-set’ of experts manages to resolve arguments about knowledge claims. Yet, internalist controversies do not always reach closure; dissent may persist while scientific work continues. A controversy within the German research network AESToR has persisted for several years, with periodic outbreaks and without impinging on academic productivity. AESToR pioneers the aesthetics of religion in religious studies; members have debated how to relate cognitive with cultural approaches to the study of religion. Three analytical perspectives – paradigm clash, conflicting visions, and productivity – explain why controversy persists in AESToR. Controversy is fuelled by conflicting visions of connectivity, competence, and ethics. These visions are informed by and give rise to a clash between paradigms: Kulturwissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft. The controversy persists because there are conflicts between views about epistemology, morality, and the future of the aesthetics of religion. Moreover, keeping the controversy alive stimulates productivity in terms of academic output and epistemological pluralism. Rather than closing the debate, participants have a stake in keeping it going

From Affect to Action: Choices in Attending to Disconcertment in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration

From Affect to Action:Choices in Attending to Disconcertment in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration

Critique in, for, with, and of responsible innovation

Critique has been a central theme in Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation (R(R)I). R(R)I promises to critique dominant technocratic and economic regimes by conducting critical analysis, promoting critical reflection, and launching critical interventions to democratize science, technology, and innovation. However, the sheer success of R(R)I as a policy concept promoted by influential international organizations, a measure to satisfy consumer demands in tech companies, and a pedagogical program advertised to students, suggests that its critical impetus has been curbed by the institutions it sought to confront. Tasked with enacting critique within the dominant regimes it aims to challenge, R(R)I finds itself in a double bind. This collection probes the role that critique has played and could play in R(R)I. Fourteen contributions shed light on the multiple ways in which critique has been conceptualized, performed, and debated in R(R)I, and they discuss how critique could be reclaimed and become more generative for the responsible governance of science, technology, and innovation. Taken together, the contributions indicate that critique is as flexible as R(R)I’s scholarly styles, that it operates in different modes and across each of these styles, and that more consciously cultivating such difference provides generative responses to R(R)I’s double bind

Beyond kindness:A proposal for the flourishing of science and scientists alike

We argue that many of the crises currently afflicting science can be associated with a present failure of science to sufficiently embody its own values. Here, we propose a response beyond mere crisis resolution based on the observation that an ethical framework of flourishing derived from the Buddhist tradition aligns surprisingly well with the values of science itself. This alignment, we argue, suggests a recasting of science from a competitively managed activity of knowledge production to a collaboratively organized moral practice that puts kindness and sharing at its core. We end by examining how Flourishing Science could be embodied in academic practice, from individual to organizational levels, and how that could help to arrive at a flourishing of scientists and science alike.</p