Abstract
ABSTRACTIt has been argued that responsible research and innovation (RRI) requires critique of the ‘worlds’ implicated in the future imaginaries associated with new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation on imaginaries by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as demonstrated by Yolande Strengers’ work on imaginaries of ‘smartness’. In this paper, we show how a novel combination of narrative interviews and multimodal methods can help explore future imaginaries of smartness through the lens of biographical experiences of socio-technical changes in domestic energy use. In particular, this approach can open up a critical space around socio-technical imaginaries by exploring the investments that individuals have in different forms of engagement with the world. The paper works with a psychosocial conceptual framework that draws on theoretical resources from science and technology studies to explain how valued forms of subjectivity may be conceptualised as emerging out of the ‘friction’ of engagement with the world. Using this framework, we show how biographical narratives of engagement with technologies from the Energy Biographies project can extend into critical deliberation on future imaginaries. The paper demonstrates the value of ‘thick’ data relating to the affective dimensions of subjective experience for RRI.
Highlights
In this paper, we argue that one of the ways in which responsible research and innovation (RRI) can benefit from qualitative social science research is through its capacity to open up and extend the critical space around socio-technical future imaginaries
We show how, when combined with a multimodal approach that uses films as stimulus material, it is possible to move within narrative interviews from individual biographies into the exploration of social futures, creating a dialogue between individual experiences and shared technological expectations
Earlier, we proposed that qualitative social science has an important contribution to make to the ‘hermeneutic turn’ in technology assessment, and to the assessment of visions and imaginaries
Summary
We argue that one of the ways in which responsible research and innovation (RRI) can benefit from qualitative social science research is through its capacity to open up and extend the critical space around socio-technical future imaginaries. The importance of the critical investigation of socio-technical future imaginaries (Fujimura 2003) for RRI has been argued for in recent science and technology (STS) studies literature By disciplining shared technological expectations, socio-technical imaginaries help to shape and constrain choices between distinct technology pathways. In the process, they may obscure unquestioned social priorities which have helped to shape these options. Critical assessments of the assumptions that underlie imaginaries have been positioned as an important contribution to the ‘upstream’ assessment of socio-technical innovation
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