Care and STS: re‐embedding socio‐technical futuresDr Christopher Groves (Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK)grovesc1@cf.ac.uk4S/EASST 2016, Barcelona, 31 August – 3 September

‘The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens’

Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Now: t=0 Future: t=n

Care and STS

RRI

• Innovators’ responsibility to ‘care for the future’ (Macnaghten, Owen and Stilgoe 2013)

• Make socio-technical innovation more responsive/ inclusive An

nemarie Mol

• The Logic of Care (2008): care as temporal structure

• Subjective capability mediated by devices & infrastructures

• Involves narrative –based practical reasoning

Mari

a Puig de la

Bellacasa • Care as

interdependence

• ‘Ontological constraint’ not ethical imperative

• Potential basis of ‘somatic ethics’ for STS

Influence of the ethics of careRRI

• Make innovation more responsive to broader range of societal needs

• Ethical framework: virtue ethics rather than consequentialist

• Participatory governance of technoscience in face of uncertainty

Anne

marie

Mol

• Care is co-constructed

• Transactional relationship between carer(s) and cared-for

• Care anticipates concrete futures through production of narratives

‘[…] people themselves (can) have knowledge about their own subjectivity; in principle they are competent to express who they are and what they need. It takes seriously people's stories about what they need to live well’

Selma Sevenhuijsen, 1998

Influence of the ethics of careM

aria

Puig de la

Bellacasa • Care as

interdependence• ‘Ontological

constraint’ not ethical imperative

• Emphasis on interdependence as survival constraint for bios

• Interdependence as expression of principle of symmetry

‘[Care is] everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all that we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.

Fisher & Tronto, 1993

‘In that sense, as permaculture care ethics consider, humans are not the only ones caring for the earth and its beings – we are in relations of mutual care.’

De la Bellacasa, 2010

‘[Earthworms] take care of our waste, they process it so that it becomes food again.’

De la Bellacasa, 2010

Being care-full about care• Threat of flattening

relationships• Interdependence is not

identical to care• Tronto/Mol underline

that care implies particular modes of subjectivity: attentiveness, responsiveness

• These need to be understood explicitly as future-orientated/ anticipatory

Opening the debate: care and futures• Heidegger: care as future-

oriented temporal structure of human being

• Ethics of care adds concreteness /relationality

• Care is a relational capacity through which we live interdependence, orienting us towards singular futures

• Concern for material needs but also for what those cared for might come to be and be able to do

‘All active ethical life is concerned with foresight, is a life lived in the future and for the future. That is the defining essence of ethical activity.’

Nikolai Hartmann, Ethik (1926), p. 485

Subjectivity, attachment, meaning• Care implies

investments in singular futures▫ People, non-humans,

places, institutions, practices, ideals

• Life is more than survival; interdependence is more than that through which we survive

‘The meaning of our lives cannot, therefore, be understood as a search to satisfy generalizable needs for food, shelter, sex, company and so on, as if our particular relationships were simply how we had provided for them. It is more the other way round: without attachments we lose our appetite for life.’

Peter Marris, 1996

Caring for self and place“We've got nothing, we're a very, very quiet area, we've never had anything, the only thing we've ever had is the fact that we're rural, that you can walk outside your door and you're in country, you're in total country”

“Anna”, Neath Port TalbotDulais Valley, Neath Port Talbot

Caring for ideals & technologies‘I hope we will not lose all sense of striving for the future or of interest in the undiscovered, nor refuse to make any journey unless every step can be counted and measured in advance. The road to successful and economic power stations is uncharted. I hope we can maintain our resolve to continue the exploration. ’

Sir John Hill, then head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority , 1971 (from Welsh, 2000)

Towards a politics of care in STS

“In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered

when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a

vernacular one” (Nixon, 2011: 17)

Re-embedding socio-technical futures

• How do socio-technical assemblages and subjectivities participate together to constitute care for singular futures?

• What individual and collective investments can be traced, and how are they shaped by▫ subjective /collective capabilities (attachments,

knowledges, affect)▫ practices and equipment

• What political effects follow from such investments?

Thank you for your attentionhttp://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGrovesgrovesc1@cf.ac.uk