Abstract
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.
Highlights
The notion of critique has remained underdeveloped in interrelated discourses on Responsible Innovation (RI) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)
Interdisciplinary R(R)I collaborations have embedded humanities scholars and social scientists in technoscientific spaces where they aim to both study and contribute to research and innovation processes. To pursue this double agenda, they must maintain critical distance so as to call these processes into question without operating on an epistemological meta-level that misses the issues at hand
This article demonstrates how humanities scholars and social scientists engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations with neuroscientists have managed to strike this balance by enacting generative critique in experimental entanglements [44,45,46,47,48, 97, 112]
Summary
The notion of critique has remained underdeveloped in interrelated discourses on Responsible Innovation (RI) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) Whereas the former has strong US policy and academic roots, the latter emerged as a policy discourse from the European Commission’s Science in Society programme [1, 2]. Both discourses speak to the integration of societal concerns and needs into research and technology development processes [3,4,5]. What these different takes on the relation between R(R)I and critique have in common is that they are prevalent in R(R)I discourses, but do not specify critique
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