TIME Excellence Lecture 14-03-23@17:00

Please join us for a webinar on Tuesday the 14th of March 2023 at 17:00 Athens time. The speaker is Stephen Hilgartner, Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University. The title of the talk is “The Ubiquity of Urgency and the Limits of RRI".

This webinar is free and open to all. The moderator is Dr. Andreas Panagopoulos. Join Zoom Meeting: https://uoc-gr.zoom.us/j/84597107176?pwd=QzI2WUF2VnlSQkhHejRySE9BY2c3UT09

Meeting ID: 845 9710 7176

Passcode: 526295

Abstract: The exigencies of managing emergencies stand in tension with the goals of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and its vision of wide-ranging anticipation, unfettered reflexivity, stage-gated commitments, and inclusive deliberation. Large-scale emergencies arguably produce especially sharp tensions between urgency and RRI. But a constructivist perspective that asks how situations come to be defined as “urgent” suggests that claims about the urgency of innovation during widely recognized emergencies are the tip of a very large iceberg. Innovation-is-urgent claims are ubiquitous, and actors advance them in a variety of institutional spaces for many reasons. This paper argues that innovation-is-urgent claims play a wide role in constricting—and at times opening up—possibilities for RRI. How, then, do some of these claims become credible and consequential? Under what circumstances do they succeed in narrowing the focus of attention, making time short, winning resource commitments, delegating decisions to small groups, shortcutting normal procedures, and justifying states of exception? This paper explores these questions by examining the control of knowledge in situations defined as urgent. It argues that in such situations, knowledge-control regimes (KCRs) play an important role in shaping the possibilities for the kinds of deliberation that RRI envisions. By KCRs, I refer to legal or lawlike arrangements that configure entitlements and burdens pertaining to knowledge, a category that includes but is not limited to intellectual property regimes.