From Affect to Action: Choices in Attending to Disconcertment in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Abstract

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Exploring the politics of science communication research: looking at science communication from a social justice perspective

“…We need a sophisticated account of the embodied dimensions of science communication. Building on a small but growing body of research, we suggest this embodied approach would reveal and dismantle the structural inequalities in accounts that foreground science as a largely cognitive, discursive and disembodied enterprise [see for instance Smolka, Fisher & Hausstein, 2021;Lindén, 2020;Steinert & Roeser, 2020;Wray, 2018;S. R. Davies, 2015S.…”

A comparative, sociotechnical design perspective on Responsible Innovation: multidisciplinary research and education on digitized energy and Automated Vehicles

“…consumer-facing firms) and some government and foundation funders do see the value of including RI in their priorities (Eastwood et al 2019;Long et al 2020;Steen and Nauta 2020;Taebi et al 2014;van de Poel et al 2020). Where the engagement with societal goals occurs early in the design process (such as at the proposal-writing and problem-definition stage), the outcome of these collaborations can be quite creative and can lead to changes in how both technical and social researchers think about their research (Blok et al 2015;Koops et al 2015;Radatz et al 2019;Smolka et al 2020;Van de Poel 2009). Nevertheless, working toward RI requires recognition of the tensions in the underlying values between, for example, the social sciences and computer sciences, and it also requires a steep learning curve for social scientists who do not have a technical background.…”

The Integrative Expert: Moral, Epistemic, and Poietic Virtues in Transformation Research

“…The protocol helps structure, guides collaborative inquiry and is comprised of four components, each of which corresponds to a particular set of questions, as well as to one of the four capacities that eventually find expression in the dimensions of a widely recognized framework of responsible innovation (see Table 1 and also see [31,32]). The protocol is used to structure regular dialogues (the connections to Socratic dialogues and practices are developed in a working paper by Antonio Calleja-Lopez and Erik Fisher [33]) for a set period [28,30], and the results are qualitatively analyzed using the midstream modulation analytical framework [24,29,34]. STIR studies have empirically documented three typical types of modulations: Reflexive learning, value deliberations, and practical adjustments.…”

“…[36,37]. Numerous STIR studies not only document technical experts "taking more into account" in ways that modulate their technical work, they also suggest that the dispositions of the experts undergo subtle but meaningful changes in correlation to the modulations, e.g., [24,30,34,[38][39][40][41][42][43].…”