Transition to Science 2.0:‘remoralizing’ the economy of science

The present is a moment of crisis and transition, both generally and specifically in “knowledge” and its institutions. Acknowledging this elicits the key questions: where are we? Where are we headed? What, if anything, can be done about this? And what can the “economics of science” contribute to this? This paper assumes a “cultural political economy of research & innovation” (CPERI) perspective to explore the current upheaval and transition in the system of academic knowledge production, at the confluence of accelerating commercialisation and the seemingly opposing movement of “open science.” This perspective affords a characterisation of the core of the current crises as a crisis of moral economy; an issue to which a political economy of epistemic authority is in turn crucial. A “remoralizing” of knowledge production is thus a matter of key systemic importance, though it is important to understand such developments in power-strategic, and not explicitly moral, terms. Much of the current moves towards “open science” and “massively open online courses” (MOOCs) can also then be seen as self-defeating developments that simply exacerbate the crisis of a viable “economy of science” and in no sense its solution. Their lasting significance, however, is more likely to lie precisely in their effects on the construction of a new moral economy of knowledge production

Putting the power in ‘socio-technical regimes’ – e-mobility transition in China as political process

A mobility low-carbon transition is a key issue both socially and for mobilities research. The multi-level perspective (MLP) is justifiably a leading approach in such research, with important connections to high-profile socio-technical systemic analyses within the mobilities paradigm. The paper explores the key contributions that a Foucauldian-inspired cultural political economy (CPE) offers, going beyond central problems with the MLP, specifically regarding: a productive concept of power that affords analysis of the qualitatively novel and dynamic process of transition; and the incorporation of the exogenous ‘landscape’ into the analysis. This move thus resonates with growing calls for attention to power dynamics in mobilities research and a ‘structural’ turn. In making this case, we deploy the key case study of contemporary efforts towards mobility transition in China. This not only sets out more starkly the importance of MLP’s gaps but also provides an empirical case to illustrate, albeit in the form of informed speculation, possible routes to low-carbon urban mobility transition and the inseparability from broader qualitative power transitions at multiple scales, including the global

Desert rain.

Includes bibliographical references

Blinded by (Economic) Science

A book review of Paula Stephan's (2012) 'How Economics Shapes Science', Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Realizing the Beckian vision:cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism and low-carbon China as political education

‘Methodological cosmopolitanism’ connotes a profound transformation of the (social) sciences as forms of public reflexive social analysis on learning to live well together through building homes in the world: what may be called the ‘Beckian vision’, in memory of Ulrich Beck. This short note considers how Beck’s concept of emancipatory catastrophism may not be the most productive development of his own programme. This is precisely brought out by a methodologically cosmopolitan analysis of a key East Asian response to the global risk of climate change: innovation of low-carbon cities in China. Instead, these presumptively archetypically cosmopolitan initiatives offer something of a political education regarding the irreducibly strategic power/knowledge dynamics at work – including in ongoing contestation about the very term ‘cosmopolitan’

Green Keynesianism:Bringing the entrepreneurial state back in(to question)?

Since the global financial crisis of 2007/8, proliferating calls for a Keynesian Green New Deal have cast the publicly (and environmentally) minded state as a necessary driver of technological innovation and social transformation, while, vice versa, innovation has moved to political centre-stage. The history and genesis of this particular Green Keynesian paradigm illustrate that some of its most high-profile proponents selectively and problematically frame twentieth-century Keynesianism and the 'public good'. It is important to examine critically the calls for an 'entrepreneurial state' in which Green Keynesian ideas are mobilized in support of an agenda for continued and accelerated development of commercially focused, privately developed green technologies. The entrepreneurial state represents a neoliberal re-appropriation of Green Keynesianism, where dominant financial actors (in Silicon Valley, as opposed to on Wall Street) are tapped as the visionaries who can and should set our collective innovation agenda. Although there is a need for large-scale, coordinated techno-social efforts to address climate change, supporting 'green' innovation cannot simply be framed as maximizing 'innovation' while taking the 'state' for granted. Instead, it must entail a careful assessment of the specific trajectories of innovation being enabled and the underlying socio-natures that they maintain and promote. Science and technology studies (STS)-informed analysis allows, and compels, asking how socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state-still the primary institution and system of social relations of collective governance-a core but neglected political, technological and ecological project of our time, with a key role for STS

China beyond China: Infrastructuring and Ecologising a New Global Hegemony? (Editorial)

Since the call for papers for this Special Issue less than two years ago, the world has faced a stream of existential challenges, with the background drumbeat of environmental catastrophe(s) and geopolitical tensions growing ever louder. At this moment of unprecedented global challenges, it is increasingly apparent that the sphere of international politics and government, to which citizens would turn for action, is itself also displaying a deep crisis of structural dysfunction. The growing influence of China appears to be both a contributing cause and partial effect of the perceived international vacuum of the multilateral action needed to prevent and respond to such a serious moment of planetary crises. The burning question of the age arguably concerns how China will use, expand or lose its remarkable sources of economic, political and technological influence in this system crisis scenario while attempting to stabilise (or at least not upend) its own economic and socio-political conditions in the process. How will China actually go beyond China? And what world - what world order, what planet and nature, what globe-spanning sociotechnical systems - will this singularly important but not yet well-understood phenomenon create? This Special Issue opens up this agenda, presenting a series of insightful papers across a range of empirical sites that illuminate not only that profound change is underway with the (uncertain) rise of China and the global reach of its infra­structural projects amidst planetary phase shift, but also how that is currently unfolding

Green Keynesianism:Bringing the entrepreneurial state back in(to question)?

Since the global financial crisis of 2007/8, proliferating calls for a Keynesian Green New Deal have cast the publicly (and environmentally) minded state as a necessary driver of technological innovation and social transformation, while, vice versa, innovation has moved to political centre-stage. The history and genesis of this particular Green Keynesian paradigm illustrate that some of its most high-profile proponents selectively and problematically frame twentieth-century Keynesianism and the 'public good'. It is important to examine critically the calls for an 'entrepreneurial state' in which Green Keynesian ideas are mobilized in support of an agenda for continued and accelerated development of commercially focused, privately developed green technologies. The entrepreneurial state represents a neoliberal re-appropriation of Green Keynesianism, where dominant financial actors (in Silicon Valley, as opposed to on Wall Street) are tapped as the visionaries who can and should set our collective innovation agenda. Although there is a need for large-scale, coordinated techno-social efforts to address climate change, supporting 'green' innovation cannot simply be framed as maximizing 'innovation' while taking the 'state' for granted. Instead, it must entail a careful assessment of the specific trajectories of innovation being enabled and the underlying socio-natures that they maintain and promote. Science and technology studies (STS)-informed analysis allows, and compels, asking how socio-technological innovation and their constitutive power relations are crucially interrelated, making the reshaping of the state-still the primary institution and system of social relations of collective governance-a core but neglected political, technological and ecological project of our time, with a key role for STS

Complexity, knowledge politics and the remaking of class:response to Levins

The ascendancy of sciences capable of grappling with complexity is undoubtedly to be welcomed, not least in this moment of profound and overlapping systemic problems. Yet the emergence of sciences with a more sophisticated epistemology alone offers no reassurance that such knowledge will then primarily, or better, serve emancipatory and/or critical purposes. Rather, such knowledge must be treated as neither good nor bad per se, but dangerous. From this perspective, the paper explores the knowledge politics of the present conjuncture, the context for this rise of the complexity sciences. It discerns a new politics of security and “preparedness” that could well serve to construct a new dominant paradigm of complexity sciences that, to the contrary, serves primarily to construct a new “scientific” legitimacy for the egregious inequalities of the age of neoliberalism-in-crisis

Mobility intersections:social research, social futures

This special issue seeks to deepen conversations at the intersections between mobilities research and a number of adjacent fields. Contributions explore how mobilities research has emerged and travelled along with a range of approaches concerned with the lived production of socio-material orders, such as science and technology studies, non-representational and feminist theory, critical and speculative design, and cosmopolitanism, to name but a few, while also intersecting with many applied fields, such as transport planning and policy, disability studies, or disaster response. The field of mobilities research has grown by connecting different epistemological frames, and offering new post-disciplinary approaches to complex interconnected phenomena. In pausing to reflect on these mobility intersections, we suggest that mobilities research is integral to a broader project of transforming the social sciences that is currently underwa