Sociotechnical Imaginary
2.4 Public Engagement with Science in the Context of Affect
2.4.1 Moving Beyond ‘Moving Beyond the Deficit Model’
Much work in science communication scholarship has been put into dispelling the deficit model from the theories and practices of public engagement with science
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(Wynne 1991, 1992; Irwin 1995, 2001; Miller 1995; Davies 2008; Davies et al. 2009; Williams et al. 2017). Williams et al. (2017, p.91) write that the deficit model assumes
public unease is caused primarily by a lack of sufficient knowledge (a deficit of understanding) and that the best way to overcome this is through the provision of accurate and didactic communication of scientific knowledge on risks and benefits, which will best engender public support and the acceptance of new technologies.
The consensus within this tradition of science communication is so firmly opposed to the deficit model of engagement that Brian Trench argues overcoming it has become something of a foundational myth for the discipline:
The story is a straightforward one: science communication used to be conducted according to a ‘deficit model’, as one-way communication from experts with knowledge to publics without it; it is now carried out on a ‘dialogue model’ that engages publics in two-way communication and draws on their own information and experiences (cited in Davies and Horst 2016, pp.217-218).
Its ‘continued reappearance’, despite having ‘repeatedly been declared dead’ (Irwin et al. 2018, p.9), makes it a topic of continued discussion within science communication (Smallman 2014; Simis et al. 2016; Gustafson and Rice 2016; Burri 2018).27 However, scholars are starting to look beyond it at other ways of framing the issue of public engagement (Stilgoe 2007; Welsh and Wynne 2013; de Saille 2015; Chilvers and Kearnes 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; Davies 2016; Irwin et al. 2018). Davies and Horst argue that the aim is to ‘open up scholarly thinking and to point to the need for fresh analyses, new concepts, and other forms of modelling and theorising’ (2016, p.218).28 One of the STS approaches that is becoming influential in this regard is Jasanoff’s co-production (Stilgoe 2013; Felt et al. 2013; Chilvers and Kearnes 2016a, 2016b, 2016c; Irwin et al. 2018). Chilvers and Kearnes (2016b, p.36) sum up this conceptualisation of the co- production of public engagement:
participation might be understood as the always-partial process of defining objects of political concern – in which the objects of public participation, the constituency
27 The science communication journal Public Understanding of Science held an essay competition for a
2016 issue based on the question: ‘In science communication, why does the idea of a public deficit always return?’ See Bauer (2016) for the issue’s introduction.
28 The idea here is not the wholesale rejection of science education or the communication of scientific
findings. These types of communication are still important. As Irwin has put it, deficits ‘are fundamental to many forms of communication and as such can never be discarded’ (2014, p.73).
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of affected publics and what is legitimated as ‘political’ are themselves always a contingent outcome of the processes of participation.
This approach turns the critical gaze of STS towards the modes of participation which produce the publics that become involved in engagement events. Groves writes that, from this viewpoint:
publics enter into participatory activities not as innocent individuals, but as situated subjects with particular identities, some of which are already formed and some which emerge in the course of participating as interests, concerns and aspirations come into play together. (2017, p.411)
The co-productionist approach to public engagement questions the idea of publics or their views embodying a ‘fixed essence’ (Groves 2017, p.410), preferring instead to conceptualise participation processes ‘as both constructed through and emergent in the performance of carefully mediated, open-ended participatory experiments’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016a, p.13). This shift in perspective involves refocusing our analysis of public engagement in order to accommodate its co-produced, emergent and relational nature. Chilvers and Kearnes (2016a, p.14-16) argue that this requires acknowledging the emergent and collective nature of publics, and the material, normative, social, and cognitive entanglement of participatory ecologies. It involves recognition that reflexivity and humility are key qualities of successful participation, owing in part to the always contingent, nonlinear, and uncertain development of engagement, and that participation is closely connected to the performance of democracy more broadly (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016a, pp.14-16).
With this understanding of engagement comes increased attention to the reflexive dimension of participation in science and technology in ways that ‘attend to the inherent uncertainties, effects and experimental normativities of participation itself’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016c, p.262). This approach favours the active involvement of diverse publics who gather around technoscientific issues, encouraging experimentation in participatory design to ‘remake participation’ so that it can become more ‘cosmopolitan, reflexive, responsible and pluralist’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016c, p.262). In this radically democratised science and technology ‘public questioning of technoscientific innovation’ is seen as ‘opening up alternative understandings of the public good’ (Felt 2015, p.121). In experimental reflexive participation, envisioning the
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collective good is not a job reserved for policy makers or scientists but should include the broader reaches of society who will be impacted by those visions. As Felt puts it:
public choices are not for or against technology but for or against particularly imagined forms of life – and these sociotechnical imaginaries are not given in advance but are constructed through the collective work of designing futures that seem to a nation’s citizens worth attaining (2015, p.121).
It is here that STS science communication scholars nail their normative colours to the mast. Their view of participation is a democratic one that values experimentation, openness, reflexivity, and critique. It is underpinned by a powerful sense of humility in the face of the overdetermined, contingent, and unpredictable and changeable nature of science-society relations. And yet, as they argue, attention must still be paid to those places where power does accumulate, innovations become black-boxed and broader scale interpretative repertoires solidify. This wider scale – the scale of the sociotechnical imaginary – is where ‘relational reflexivities’ require nurturing ‘in a more thoroughly systematic and distributed sense’ while being continually attentive to ‘the stabilities and possible forms of emergence in constitutional relations between citizens, science and the state’ (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016c, p.262).
As such, participation must be understood ‘in relation to processes and conditions operating at different spatial and temporal scales’ (Groves 2017, p.411). Felt (2015, p.178) encourages exploration of ‘the multiple invisible temporal textures as well as the temporal choreographies (i.e., the entanglements of different temporalities) of participatory practices’ in order to better understand the plurality of ways that publics can gather around important or controversial technoscientific issues. Felt et al. (2015, p.28) suggest that this should be coupled with the development of new spaces for ‘reflection and engagement’ in order ‘to build a governance environment that allows for deeper and broader integration of societal concerns in all their actual diversity’ where participation can be ‘practised in the realities of particular contexts’.
2.4.2 Public Engagement and Affect
One aspect of the realities of engagement contexts which is of interest to this research is the affective, everyday dimension. Chilvers and Kearnes (2016b, p.40) argue that affect is an important aspect of co-productionist participation. They state that an overly
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‘object-oriented perspective on public participation can have the effect of underplaying the role of emotions, beliefs and affective dimensions in the co-production of collective participatory practices’. As such, they encourage research that explores ‘the role of emotions, feelings, beliefs and imaginaries in making participation, and the importance of embodied, emotional, imaginative, sensory and affective elements in the emergence of participatory experiments’ (2016b, p.40). Irwin et al. (2018) support this view. They write that ‘environmental understanding inevitably […] involves values and affect’ and consequently a key research challenge in science communication is ‘to examine how values and emotions are expressed in environmental communications and how they relate to actors’ and organisations’ sense of environmental responsibility’ (2018, p.19). While still sparse, investigations of the affective domains of public engagement are beginning to appear in science communication scholarship.
Kearnes and Wynne (2007, p.136) argue that public engagement, like politics more broadly, ‘is increasingly characterised by numerous attempts to engender and enlist enthusiasm, hope, fear and affection’. Specifically, they argue, science communication has become less about rational understanding and more about ‘enthusiasm and confidence’ (2007, p.137). In research examining natural scientists’ perspectives on public communication activities, Loroño-Leturiondo and Davies (2018, p.4) found that they were concerned with creating a ‘good experience’ characterised by ‘positive affects’. Michael explores affects of frustration in his articulation of a ‘mundane PEST [public engagement with science and technology]’ that involves a ‘pre- public’ that is ‘characterized by a miasma of tacit, unarticulated affects, visceralities and pre-cognitions’ (2016, p.94). Harvey’s discussion of public engagement evaluation observes that the literature focuses on measuring instrumental goals of participants which consequently excludes that ‘participants have an experience and that that experience can be dramatic and emotional’ (2009, p.140).
Sarah R. Davies, an STS-oriented science communication scholar, has looked with some consistency at the emotional dimension of public engagement. She makes the point that ‘STS-informed practice and analysis of public engagement with science has tended to focus on the discursive to the exclusion of other features, such as embodiment, materiality, affect and place’; public engagement involves ‘not only spaces in which language is at play, but as processes constituted by embodied experience, objects, and emotions’ (2014, p.90). This is an important insight for my suggestion that we draw attention to the affective dimension of imaginaries in general,
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and the anti-fracking imaginary in north Leitrim, in particular. With Horst, Davies provides examples of the emotional dimension of science communication processes and the publics constituted through them by drawing attention to the various ways affects ‘overflow expectations’ (Davies and Horst 2016, p.175). They describe moments of reverence, overpowering nostalgia and boredom in engagement activities, arguing that these aspects of participation indicate ‘how scientific citizenship is performed through science communication by means of material and affective engagements’ (2016, p.182).
Elsewhere, Davies and Horst (2015) examine how responsible research and innovation might be better understood by paying attention to how scientists use affective skills of care and craft in their roles as research managers. This mundane, yet emotional, dimension of scientific practice sheds light on the kinds of narratives and meanings available to those in leadership in the management of research groups. Further, Davies and Horst indicate the potential for normative pressures on members of research groups to reproduce a ‘culture of care’ indexing who is ‘cared for’ and thus ‘committed to the group as organization’ (2015, p.388). Davies also writes about the role that affects such as ‘playfulness and pleasure’ play in the formation of identities and lifestyles of hackers (2018, p.184). Uncovering the affective dimension of hacking and making places the value of these activities largely in the private and leisure spheres rather than a broader social domain.
Davies also considers the wider implications of this mode of participation, considering how ‘passion and outrage’ are excluded from scientific citizenship which values ‘rational, cool, unemotional’ approaches to controversy or debate (2014, p.100). Davies argues, following deliberative theorists, that engagement processes potentially stand to benefit from opening up to ‘emotional creative – even disorderly – modes of communication’ (2014, p.97). Davies, following Young and Sanders, speculates there might be value in ‘going beyond reasoned argument to open deliberation up to more diverse forms of interaction: storytelling, for example, or polemic’ (Davies 2014, p.97) or ‘pictures, song, poetic imagery’ (Young and Sanders, cited in Davies 2014, p.97). By widening deliberation to incorporate the affective and creative dimensions of participation that ‘overflow’ traditional science communication, this vein of deliberative theory suggests we can generate ‘at once more open and more equitable – though perhaps also more chaotic’ modes of participation (2014, p.97). Davies addresses the normative dimension that this opens:
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If deliberation should go beyond the discursive – if it should incorporate not just reasoned argument about the technical, and its ‘implications’, but expression of the emotions and materialities implicated in particular technological presents and futures – then participatory instruments should foreground and normalize emotion, rather than suppressing it (2016, p.167).
This extends beyond more or less official engagement processes and their attention to affect to encompass the participation of ‘uninvited’ publics (Davies 2016; Wynne 2007; Welsh and Wynne 2013; de Saille 2015). Davies writes that:
it is not only formalized processes, with invited publics and norms of fairness and disinterest, which are valuable, but other, more messy instances of engagement – those where partisan publics intervene, or where protest and activism insert themselves into decision-making (2016, p.167).
This is an important point in the current context; it is precisely this type of bottom-up participation that I am interested in exploring in the context of fracking in Ireland. Davies brings the idea of public engagement back to the diverse and everyday ways that publics interact with and respond to science, going beyond the “artificial”, though no less real, formalised top-down modes of conventional science communication. As Groves points out, ‘everyday life is already participation in technoscience, full of affective atmospheres’ (2017, p.411). Drawing attention to these types of unscripted responses, Davies suggests, means ‘we can imagine deliberation on science, and therefore scientific citizenship, as something that is spread throughout society, and thus present in sites and encounters beyond the categories of invited and uninvited participation’ (2016, p.173). The STS tradition of public participation is increasingly recognising this. Chilvers and Kearnes write that ‘the emergence of new participatory spaces often overflow into multivalent forms of activist, civic or citizen science and “bottom-up” grassroots or distributed innovation’ (Chilvers and Kearnes, p.8). Public engagement takes on a broader meaning in this respect, incorporating not only official top-down instances of science communication, but bottom-up participation, where values, relevance, and ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004b) emerge. For STS scholars thinking about how participation might be remade, this is a site of increasing interest.
Wynne refers to the idea of an ‘uninvited public’ (2007) who intervene in technoscientific matters. He writes that the role of public participation ‘to enforce wider social accountability of […] normative techno-scientific technical–social imaginations’ should be achieved through ‘the normal repertoire of spontaneous and independent,
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uninvited forms of civil participatory action’ (2007, p.107) in addition to conventional engagement practices. Wynne suggests that these ‘uninvited’ interventions are usually a response to alienating expert-led representations of technoscientific issues and the concerns, saliencies, and values tied up with them. He writes that ‘uninvited forms of public engagement are usually about challenging just these unacknowledged normativities’ (2007, p.107). Welsh and Wynne point out (similarly to Felt, above) that these uninvited publics ‘are not rejecting science, but, rather, they are attempting to reframe and mobilise science in more constructive ways’ (2013, p.558). Wynne suggests that the intervention of publics in, for example controversies over genetically- modified food or environmental innovations, do not typically involve ‘a claim of competence to deal directly with specialist technical questions’ but rather to social and political issues of relevance, salience, and governance (2007, p.107). This generates tension, however, in a context where ‘mistrust of engaged, but uninvited, and independent publics, has become more directly significant’ (Welsh and Wynne 2013, p.556). For this reason, Welsh and Wynne call for an opening up of public involvement, requiring ‘a turn to participant-action research to reconfigure the STS relationship with SMS [social movement studies] in ways that are also meaningful to activists’ (2013, p.546).
Taking up this mantle, de Saille has developed the concept of the ‘unruly public’, an official imaginary which ‘disinvites’ groups who wish to engage with science ‘on
their own terms’ (2015, p.102, emphasis in original). This might involve ‘direct action
protestors, bloggers, alternative journalists’ who reject the terms set by conventional public engagement processes (2015, p.102). Dis-invitation happens in a variety of ways: ‘dismissing dissent as ‘irrational’, or vetting questions so that the most contentious cannot be asked, or screening out participants with prior opinions as biased, as well as suppressing protest’ (2015, p.103). De Saille suggests there is value in unruly responses and dismissing them risks losing novel or unexpected social views of technoscience.
I have engaged with these uninvited and at times unruly publics in the context of the anti-fracking campaign in north Leitrim. While the campaign was never officially dismissed as unruly by state bodies, this public certainly made interventions in the fracking controversy that exceeded the bounds of conventional public engagement processes such as public consultations. What these approaches to public participation offer for this research is an opening and humility with respect to the diversity of forms
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of engagement that emerge beyond official processes. This includes sensitivity to the bodily, situated, and felt responses to technoscience as well as interventions by groups outside of conventional notions of the public. The following research will explore how relations of power are formed through embodied meaning-making and the forms of engagement that this facilitates.
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