Engaging Science, Technology, and Society

Innovationism Across Transnational Landscapes

2024-01-13T09:28:49-08:00

This editorial introduces the thematic collection on STS and innovation. The collection includes eleven Engagements exploring the relationships between innovation studies (IS) and STS across various geographies. There is also an Original Research Article in this issue, by Susan Bell, Patrick Grzanka, Kelly Joyce, and Laura Senier, examining masking and not masking during COVID-19. The issue is accompanied by another six supplemental materials in the STS-Infrastructures platform including: a video recording, interview, a set of questions, syllabi, among other forms of supplemental documentation.

Masking (Not Masking) Up: An STS Visual-Intersectional Approach to Understanding Publics and Science in Times of Rapid Change

2024-04-23T10:32:59-07:00

In this paper we argue that a visual-intersectional approach can advance the field of science and technology studies (STS). Although there is a small but important body of work using visual methods in STS, it has rarely incorporated intersectional approaches. We use visual imagery about mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to illustrate the potential power of a visual-intersectional approach in STS. We chose masks for three reasons. First, debates about mask-wearing were rich with visual imagery, from home-made signs posted in homes and businesses to professionally designed and printed imagery circulated by public health agencies. Second, recommendations about face coverings outside of healthcare settings changed dramatically in the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing an opportunity to analyze how rapidly changing scientific recommendations were debated in the public sphere. Finally, as masks entered the public sphere, they quickly became evocative technologies, deeply imbued with cultural and political meanings. By focusing on signs about masks in the United States, we demonstrate how integrating visual methods of data collection and an intersectional, visual analytical lens can strengthen STS by developing deeper understandings of (a) publics and science in times of uncertainty, (b) public health as a distinct form of scientific expertise, and (c) the role of humor and place-specific messaging in science. We close with analytic priorities for future research on mask use that could advance STS theories of the collective construction of scientific knowledge and productively inform the development of public health interventions.

STS and Innovation: Borderlands, Regenerations and Critical Engagements

2023-12-31T19:28:36-08:00

This introduction to a thematic collection on the relationship between STS and innovation poses three main questions. When it comes to engaging with and acting upon socio-technical change, is ‘innovation’ part of the solution or of the problem? How should we view the relationship between STS approaches to innovation and neighbouring fields, especially Innovation Studies (IS)? What new conceptual and empirical resources can STS bring to the study of innovation (including the possible redefinition and reframing of the term itself)?

Bringing Fences Down: The Role of Critical Innovation Studies in Engaging STS with Innovation and the Contribution of Benoît Godin

2023-12-31T19:28:34-08:00

Innovation has constituted a subject of key interest for quite some time. However, only a few fields and scholars have embraced the challenge of finding ways to deconstruct our contemporary society’s most recurrent mantra. Questioning the “pro-innovation bias”, the assumption that innovation “is always good” and without undesirable consequences, is what critical studies of innovation (as a new research agenda) are trying to achieve. These critical studies might redeem the study of innovation for the STS interdisciplinary field by merging different critical perspectives. This emerging niche aims to reach beyond the techno-economic understanding of innovation, pointing a path of learning along cross-disciplinary and more critical, historical, and qualitative-based approaches to innovation phenomena – adopting as our example here the intellectual legacy of Benoît Godin (1958–2021). Godin’s work, together with other colleagues, opens up many avenues for engaging STS with innovation, and the appeal for a much-needed critical stance on science, technology and innovation (STI) ‘political’ phenomena – analysing discourses, policy narrative(s), theories, dissecting different kinds of models, etc. Our aim is to demonstrate how critical innovation study could be crucial and fascinating to an STS scholar, adopting as reference the intellectual work of Benoît Godin – whose lessons teach us how to work on a historical and discursive methodology – that studies STI policies by embracing their intellectual and conceptual histories.

Innovation Doesn’t Work: The Explanatory Power of a Socio-Technical Approach

2023-12-31T19:28:33-08:00

This comment engages with two questions introduced by Alan Irwin’s introductory essay to this thematic collection on STS and Innovation (2023), and invites the reader to reflect on them as parts of a problem-solution relationship: When it comes to engaging with and acting upon socio-technical change, is ‘innovation’ part of the solution or of the problem? What new conceptual and empirical resources can STS bring to the study of innovation? The ‘problematic side’ (the first question) of our argument is focused on the theoretical constraints of ‘innovation’ as an analytical concept. Then, to address the ‘solution side’ (the second question), we introduce an approach to socio-technical change: the interactive socio-cognitive model. This model is presented as an analytical framework that makes explicit the explanatory (and programmatic) advantages that the notion of socio-technical change has compared to innovation.

What is Innovation in the Non-English Languages?

2023-12-31T19:28:34-08:00

The paper focuses on the issue of translation and transformation of language and meaning with a focus on the word and the concept ‘innovation’ What for example are the different transformations that take place between innovation in English and similar words and concepts in Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India? The paper concludes by emphasising the need for more engagement with innovation in the non-English languages because these are more representative of the lived realities and challenges faced by communities in their respective contexts and geographies.

Frugal Ground for STS and IS: Problems of Innovation and their Commonalities

2023-12-31T19:28:33-08:00

The fields of “science, technology, and society” and “innovation studies” may come closer together in a frugally-fruitful way by engaging—with their specific tools—in the comprehension of and action upon some innovation problems, particularly those involving inequality.

A Tale of Two Perspectives on Innovation and Global Equity

2023-12-31T19:28:35-08:00

Both science and technology studies (STS) and innovation studies (IS) see great promise for technology to address global inequality, but they view it quite differently. This article compares the two approaches and examines whether and how they might learn from one another to achieve social equity and justice. To do this, I focus on the case of menstrual health innovation in India, an intervention highly praised as a clear example of potentially transformative “inclusive innovation.” The article argues that IS would benefit from understanding innovation as a sociotechnical system and taking the political dimensions seriously. Meanwhile, we STS scholars should learn to translate our grassroots-based, locally-sensitive solutions to policymakers oriented towards scalability.

From “More Innovation” to “Better Innovation”?

2023-12-31T19:28:36-08:00

This paper departs from the observation that there seems to be a new appetite for critique and reflexivity in innovation policy and innovation studies (IS), owed in part to an abundance of recent innovation controversies. In what follows, I offer a cautiously optimistic take on what this new appetite means for STS’s relationship with mainstream innovation settings and why STS knowledge seems to be particularly en vogue right now. I explore three basic STS messages that have gained wider traction in mainstream innovation circles and that many actors not trained in STS now readily embrace: on the politics of technology, the politics of experimentation, and the work needed to situate innovation practices locally. Whether or not this new appetite for STS remains, as it were, primarily instrumental, it nevertheless opens up new opportunities for wider critical engagement and impact, and perhaps a stronger institutionalization of the field of STS.

A Journey through STS and Innovation Studies

2023-12-31T19:28:35-08:00

This short contribution traces the author’s journey in English universities, through innovation studies to STS in the last two decades of the twentieth century. It highlights the diversity of meanings of the concept of “innovation”, over time, across disciplines and social actors, and the importance of continuing to contest definitions. It concludes by reflecting on what Innovation Studies can offer to STS scholarship.

Dissolving Boundaries in the Policy System

2023-12-31T19:28:34-08:00

Based on personal experiences with science policy advice, this paper argues that science and technology studies (STS) would benefit from developing closer collaboration and collegial links with innovations studies (IS). When it comes to achieving impact outside our academic circles, disciplinary boundaries do not seem very relevant. Rather, it would be preferential if our contributions were based on systematic interaction with neighbouring fields – and if our relations with those fields were based on strong networks of collaboration.

Encountering Innovation, Countering Innovation

2023-12-31T19:28:32-08:00

What could be gained by putting science and technology studies (STS) in conversation with innovation studies (IS)? These distinct fields have shared people over decades, as they build concepts, careers, institutions, and even nations. I review how this collection offers accounts of how STS and IS have been practiced in different times and locations: resisting underdevelopment, Western and middle-class assumptions about progress, or technology-centric policy. I argue, however, that it is critical to clarify the difference between innovation as an analytic and as an emic and ideological category. Neither STS nor IS should take for granted the ways political economy, class relations, racialization and gendering, and even national(ist) ideologies shape what counts as desirable forms of newness, what newness ought to be contained or criminalized, and the hierarchies of socio-technical transformation that emerge out of that. I offer three examples: San Diego’s “smart streetlights” program where “innovation” as an ideology devalues or erases the creativity and knowledge already manifest among residents; Amazon® Mechanical Turk worker advocacy and the limits of doing scholarship with policy relevance when workers do not have organized power; and mid-twentieth-century Iran, where I show what IBM® throwing computers into the ocean can tell us about innovation as a form of enclosure, repression, empire, and waste of collective resources and knowledge.

STS and Innovation: Building and Jumping Fences

2023-12-31T19:28:32-08:00

In this short contribution, I reflect upon the thematic collection as a whole, returning in particular to the three original questions posed in the collection’s introduction. In conclusion, I argue that STS has a substantial heritage in researching and engaging with innovation. However, drawing inspiration from the contributions in this collection, now is the time to take the STS-innovation relationship even further forward.

Erratum

2024-04-23T20:27:04-07:00

The author has identified the following error in the published article:

This Erratum relates to the following article: Bell, Susan E., Patrick R. Grzanka, Kelly Joyce, and Laura Senier. 2023. “Masking (Not Masking) Up: An STS Visual-Intersectional Approach to Understanding Publics and Science in Times of Rapid Change.” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 9(2): 9–40. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2023.1363.

On page 22 it should read: “In figure 4, a local coffee shop used humor to encourage compliance with the local indoor mask mandate in Massachusetts.” rather than “In figure 5, a local coffee shop used humor to encourage compliance with the local indoor mask mandate in Massachusetts.”

On page 23, it should read: “Our visual-intersectional analysis of figure 4. . .” rather than “Our visual-intersectional analysis of figure 6 . . .”