Critical Participation: Inflecting Dominant Knowledge Practices through STS

Abstract

gAry lee downey reign. Achieving travel for STS knowledge involves expressing it through techniques, devices, infrastructures, selves, and other STS sensibilities and then attaching them in empirical settings beyond the boundaries of the field. 5 This invitation confronted me with a particularly vexed issue faced by projects in STS making & doing: how to express and attach STS knowledge in ways that actually inflect and reframe dominant knowledge practices?Alongside the activist educators, my own critical analyses of the making of engineers have found engineering to confront itself with a significant cultural problem, one that can make engineering practices self-limiting. Yet we have understood the issue differently. The educators diagnosed a cultural problem that surrounds the technical core of engineering practices and, hence, lies beyond the engineering science curriculum. My sociotechnical accounts have rooted a problem precisely within the technical core of engineering practices. From this point of view, any self-limitation in engineering practices starts in the heart of engineering science calculation rather than in practices around it. 6 The advocates of active learning were seeking an expert consultant to help them overcome resistance from stubborn engineering faculty. I was seeking practices to enable sociotechnical knowledge to travel into and inflect their world, persuading them to relocate the cultural problem within the technical core and, hence, the curriculum. When reframed in sociotechnical terms, I claimed, the resistance they felt to practices of active learning certainly included but also extended beyond specific techniques for teaching and learning. It is born in the settled knowledge, identities, and commitments of those faculty as engineers.

Making a difference? Nanotechnology and the quest for Responsible Innovation

“…74 First as a parliamentary Technology 74 Cf. Heyward and Rayner (2013) and Downey (2021) for discussions about critical participation as a researcher (these have been part of the aforementioned WTMC training). 'Following the quest' is inspired by 'following the actors' in Actor Network Theory (ANT, Latour 2005) and refers to the reconstructions of the quest for Responsible Innovation in this thesis, both at the level of the case studies and in wider discourses about the governance of research and innovation.…”