Innovation Residues – Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures (INNORES)

Engagements of INNORES

Engagements of INNORES

Responsible innovation, experimentation and matters of care: How do actors express situated visions of responsibility and care in settings which could be classified as real-world experiments?

INNORES contributes to these discussions by developing an empirically grounded understanding of modes of care and responsibility and the infrastructures put in place to sustain these modes of care with regard to innovation residues. In this context, we also address questions of intergenerational justice. How all this varies across technopolitical cultures will help us point to the tensions we find when a global problem is translated into more local/regional forms of politics.

Orders of worth and valuation constellations: How do actors in different environments, constellations and situations produce, assess, distribute and negotiate the diverse dimensions of worth of innovation? And, how is this related to their perception and understanding of residues?

INNORES closely investigates valuation practices and constellations across different sites by elaborating how technopolitical histories matter in different national contexts and how the relation between the often-called-for, shared European values,  and locally entrenched value systems looks in practice; by studying how waste/wasting and value are balanced; and by seeing how local and global value considerations get articulated.

Assembling residues: Multiplicity and coordination: How are residues assembled to become matters of care? Where are the sites in which these assemblages are made and who gets a voice?

INNORES offers a detailed analysis of the ontological politics of problem framing in different constellations. This will produce novel insights into competing framings and how specific frames can gain more powerful, morally acceptable positions and sideline others. It will elaborate how life with residues is imagined and practiced in different technopolitical cultures. However, we will also elaborate on the contradictions, frictions, etc., we observe.

Caring for our futures – Imagination and anticipation: What role do future visions play when making choices related to innovations and their residues? And what are the temporal horizons which enter these considerations?

INNORES delivers deep insights into the way temporalities matter when assessing the worth of innovations in relation to the residues they produce, and when modes of care are implemented. In particular, we will investigate the concrete time horizons that are embedded into discourses on the future of innovation societies. The aim is to develop the concept of long-durée futures, to show the complexity of imagining and caring for futures that stretch well beyond anything we have experienced or can imagine.

Europe and Three Countries – A multidimensional comparison

Europe and Three Countries – A multidimensional comparison

Comparison will be achieved through

=> three case studies of innovation residues: nuclear waste, microplastics, and data waste.

=> three national contexts (France, Ireland and Austria) and the supranational level of the European Union.

The countries were chosen for their differences in technopolitical cultures and their history of dealing with these innovations (e.g., France’s nuclear focus; Ireland’s presence in data centre industry; Austria’s anti-nuclear position and digitization efforts; different ways of governing microplastics in the three countries). Complementing these three contexts with a study of European discussions and regulatory efforts is an asset; it shows how the European debate frames and is being framed by national contexts. This allows us to understand similarities and differences in the value constellations at work and how seemingly shared approaches might play out rather differently in practice.

=> different arenas of debate: policy, expert and civic arenas will allow us to see the multiplicity both within each national setting and the specificities of performances and framings of the residues across areas emerging from situated thought styles and value registers.

The analysis will engage in a multi-dimensional comparison. This will not mean simply comparing countries. Rather, comparison allows us to be attentive to diverse modalities of difference and to forge new connections between residues, persons, institutions and many other elements. This will help us to extract the many different ways of living with and (not) caring for residues and make neglected dimensions visible.

Nuclear Waste

Nuclear Waste

Nuclear waste is in many ways the icon for those residues that bring complex longue-term environmental futures with them and where expectations that a technical fix solving the problem will be found have been circulating for more than three quarters of a century. There is a rich body of literature addressing aspects such as protests, trust and participation around nuclear waste facilities, or regulatory efforts, some even speak of nuclearity. Studies, however, remain focused on specific phenomena not connecting them to wider questions of innovation and innovation choices. Choices around nuclear technologies and the related waste are framed as a national/local issue of confinement and control, despite their potential global future impact. Thus, mainly countries with high-level waste from power plants are studied, giving little attention to countries/sites that “only” have to deal with low and intermediary level nuclear waste from industry, research institutes, medical applications or from extraction sites of nuclear resource material.

Microplastics

Microplastics

Microplastics designate small fragments of plastic (<5mm) entering the environment either as fibres from clothes, microbeads, or fragments of larger plastics. They are the residue of a technological innovation – plastic – that fundamentally transformed our lives. Widely ignored as potential problem (and never labelled as waste), the notion of microplastics was only coined in 2004, more than a century after the introduction of first plastics. As microplastics are found in the remotest corners of the world, it has gradually entered public debate and demands for regulations are voiced. While microplastics are by now widely seen as problematic, its potential harm is still not entirely clear and concrete knowledge of its global abundance is missing, leaving space for deep ambivalences, indeterminacy, and uncertainty. Fact is that microplastics are omnipresent, can neither be confined nor easily controlled and will be around for a long time.

Data Waste

Data Waste

Data waste is a new category of residue created through digital innovations which INNORES wants to reflect on as a “not-yet-problem,” a quasi-absence in carefully thinking about the consequential materiality of data, e.g., the potential impact of omnipresent big data visions and the extractive systems by which data are made valuable. As practices of collecting and storing (banking) data have become core activities in contemporary science and society and our thirst for more data seems to have become unsatiable, it is time to make space for critical reflections on the long-term impacts of our data practices. Data waste is thus a category of residues yet to be characterized, described, made meaning of, reflected upon, and taken care of.