What is it about?
Encouraging cooperation between academic researchers and potential users of technologies promises to result in technologies which are more societally useful. What are good ways for academics and non-academics to work together to make this happen? This paper looks at a case study which explored how academics and residents of a small town can work together to imagine new renewable energy technologies. It discusses the difficulty of reconciling residents' and academics' assumptions about what constitutes a valuable outcome of scientist-stekholder cooperation. The paper calls for new participation methodologies which make the best of both the situatedness of stakeholders and the imaginative freedom of academic research.
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Why is it important?
There is an assumption that including stakeholders in processes of technological innovation will result in technologies which are more useful and more societally acceptable. There are however very few studies which discuss in detail how this kind of inclusion may ufold.
Perspectives
I strongly believe that cooperation between academic research and non-academics is both ethically just and will lead to better outcomes for both science and society. However too often non-academics are brought in to academic projects to play very constrained roles. This project was important to me because it made a genuine attempt to shift the power to the non-academics. I believe the resulting reflection will be useful to many academics and stakholders who are trying to build trans-disciplinary collaborations.
Anna Krzywoszynska
University of Sheffield
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Opening Up the Participation Laboratory, Science Technology & Human Values, January 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0162243917752865.
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