Epilogue

Response-ability and research

Like a winding string passing tryings at risk, this essay collection is my endeavour to make explicit the situatedness and responsibility of research and researchers in the trouble, let it be in the ‘grand challenges’ of our time or in the very local challenges of survival. The situation demands increasingly open and including systems for knowledge production. Bruno Latour (1998) characterises the situation as follows:

All of us have become members of collective experiments on global warming, the influence of genetic engineering, conservation of species, demography, pollution, etc. Thus we have to practice something that, until recently, was the calling of very few specialists, namely science policy. Now everyone is led to practice science policy over a vast range of scientific and technical controversies. This has entirely modified the relations of the public with the producers of science and technology.

In this incalculability of the late modern spheres of society I place my research and efforts to promote more complex and integrated understandings of ‘society in science’ or science as a political arena.

Arie Rip (2011) discusses how science and technology can, and should, play a role in meeting the “grand challenges” of society including sustainability, global health and food, water and energy security etc.. He proposes a shift of perspective from priorities in relation to grand challenges and their implementation, to the question what existing and future science and scientific institutions can actually achieve. He argues while the challenge of institutional capacity building (including receptivity to grand challenges of society) is recognized, actual measures tend to be ad-hoc and superficial……dominant narratives (like the linear model of investing in science and technology to realize innovation to realize economic growth) continue to be more important in shaping what happens than in-depth analysis and diagnosis of what is happening and what future developments of the system could be.

Elisabeth Gulbrandsen with her many years of experiences from the Norwegian Research Council comments the issues of grand challenges by the questions what kind of challenge is a grand challenge? And how is the research and innovation system positioned in relation to them? Are the challenges only “out there” in society – or are they ‘in here’ in our research and innovation systems - as well? This re-thinking is a daunting task – and we have only just begun (Gulbrandsen 2015).

Within the dynamics of distributed technology and knowledge production in multi-stakeholder contexts including emerging acceptance of the understanding of ‘society in science’ and not only ‘science in society’, the issue of responsible research and innovation (RRI) appears. One of the roots of RRI, which challenges the ‘taken for granted’ split between science and society, is expressed by Ravetz (1975, p.46) as “Science takes credit for penicillin, while Society takes the blame for the Bomb.” Ari Rip (2014) indicates that RRI is a kind of social innovation, ranging from discursive and cultural innovation to institutional and practices innovation. A social innovation, alike a technological innovation, is new, uncertain and distributed. RRI in its start of a more transgressive idea has increasingly been embraced as a concept by many and especially so in the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Program.

In 2013 the first state-of-the-art book about RRI was published titled Responsible Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society (Owen, Bessant & Heintz 2013). In the foreword Jack Stilgoe states that the gap between the global rich and global poor has expanded, while the productivity of science has exponentially increased. With this in mind we cannot hesitate to ask where the responsibilities for unrealized promises and unintended impacts are placed, if science and innovation are allowed to take credit for their productivity.

Once we lift the lid on innovation to reveal its politics, we can start to see that, for all of the good intentions of individual researchers, innovation can be a form of what Ulrich Beck calls “organized irresponsibility. (Stilgoe, 2013 p. xii)

There is no doubt technologies “co-evolve” out of interactions in specific contexts. This implies the responsibility for where and how these technologies travel and with what use, to be a collective one. And once again “responsibility is not synonymous with liability, and innovation looks less and less like a pipeline, if indeed it ever resembled one.”

The danger that the term RRI becomes a polite label for the status quo is already visible in EC contexts. In 2015 the Expert Group on Policy Indicators for RRI within the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation published their report¹⁸⁸ on Indicators for promoting and monitoring Responsible Research and Innovation. The expert group defines RRI as ‘a transparent, interactive process by which societal actors and innovators become mutually responsive to each other with a view on the (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability of the innovation process and its marketable products’. The group states “RRI has acquired prominence by its status as a ‘cross-cutting issue’ of the EU framework programme for R & I, Horizon 2020, as well as its central place among the objectives of the ‘Science with and for society’ program within Horizon 2020”. I am looking for signs of the turn to ‘society in science’ in the document. There are few if any. I register the Expert Group has struggled with opening up a mandate for inviting to processes of learning and development. This indicates resistance experienced by the Expert Group. It is thus reasonable to recognize that the report reflects compromises.

Transformation ambitions expressed in the report does not leave the policy-making context. But if we take Latour’s statement above seriously we all increasingly have to consider being located in the policy-making context including researchers and engineers. Although recommendations of the use of the indicators to be taken to embody the principles of good governance, openness and participation through a network approach rather than a linear, top-down chain of command, the performance indicators for the recommended indicator criteria¹⁸⁹ are recognizable from what we have seen before. Within each of the eight indicator criteria, performance indicators are listed, predominantly quantitatively. If we as an example take indicator criteria nr 3, gender equality, ‘counting heads’ (percentage of women) dominates heavily. I find no signs of RRI gender equality indicators suggested differing from earlier EU research funding programs.

If little or none resistance for RRI occurs, then the chance increases drastically for status quo and no transformation indicated however needed in science. Perhaps it is naive to think of the macro level EU organization to welcome RRI as a transformative intervention challenging all the investments made in the dominant science discourse (of mode 1). Resistance can be recognized, as exemplified above, for the work done by skilful experts to rescue at least the existence of some RRI related initiatives. This is worth learning from.

I keep on leaning to Donna Haraway (1988), who made me aware of the fact that no innocent position exists, and to Jane Flax (1992) and her reminding of ‘the end of innocence’ in the dominant discourse of western academia.

Helga Nowotny make huge sense to me, particularly when I am with family, friends and colleagues in Tanzania and Uganda, in the following statement.

Innovation is the collective bet on a common fragile future and no side, neither science nor society, knows the secret of how to cope with its inherent uncertainties. It has to be done in some sort of alliance and a sense of direction, which is shared. Helga Nowotny (2005b)

Involution

In a lecture Donna Haraway (2014) brought up the concept / figuration of involutionary momentum. What kind of forward moving potentials lies in this concept? Haraway was referring to an article written by Hustak & Myers (2012). The article gives a fascinating story emerging from the field of chemical ecology and includes a rethinking of Darwin. The authors amplify Darwin’s modes of attention and involvement in the daily activities among insects and orchids and found “in his account the nascent contours of an affective ecology forming the grounds for a science of interspecies relations”. Hustak & Myers supplement evolutionary logics with an involutionary mode of attention, the “momentum through which organisms reach toward one another and involve themselves in one another’s lives”. They are motivated by Haraway (2007) to turn towards attention modes of relationality and “becoming with” while trying to leave the traditional evolutionary trees. It is inspiring to learn how the authors draw together feminist theories of affect¹⁹⁰, difference and responsibility as well as rhizomatic thinking by Deleuze & Guattari (1987). In addition they lean on the work of Barbara McClintock and her “feeling” for plants’ dynamic lives, which brings me back to chapter 1 in this book. Deleuze & Guattari (1987) writes about ‘creative involution’, which Hustak & Myers appreciate as an approach strengthening relations constituted through affinity. They cite Deleuze & Guttari in becoming “is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation”: it “concerns alliance”.

I frequently use words with the prefix ‘co-‘ like co-evolution, co-production, co-operation, co-opetion in my thinking and writing. Maybe it is time to advance into the ‘in-’ preface and practice tryings to go from co-evolution to in(-)volution. In the lecture mentioned above Haraway was occupied with the use of sym- like in sympoiesis meaning collectively producing systems, which cannot be defined by boundaries. This means that involutionary processes are characterized more by vitally necessary links than separate entities cooperating together. The re-thinking story of affective ecology concerning orchids by Hustak & Myers gives us an example of, even a figuration for involutionary processes, which I find possible to be used elsewhere. Another striking example on involution is the about 2 kilograms of bacteria in the human intestines – a co-existence from which neither we or the bacteria could have evolved (involved) and survived.

I would rather use involution as a concept for the stories I have told from Tanzania and Uganda, stories from contexts of very scare resources and survival, and especially so by referring - in a figurative meaning - to the following statement.

If evolutionists tend to fetishize economic logics, random mutations driving generational change, and functionalist accounts of adaptation, involutionists amplify other dimensions of ecological life. They are awake to the fleeting and contingent forms of life happening “now,” and “now,” and “now.” In so doing, they draw attention to practice and to the momentary improvisations of multispecies practitioners caught together in affectively charged ecologies. (Hustak & Myers, 2012, p. 97)

Involution is to build alliances, affinities and connections and to be aware that we always are in becoming in ‘the no longer and not yet’¹⁹¹.