Innovation Residues
Modes and Infrastructures of Caring for our Longue-durée Environmental Futures
studies the left-behinds of major fields of innovation, which impact the environment and our lives. It investigates how European innovation societies conceptualise, make sense of, live with, and care for these innovation residues, and how this shapes their relations to innovation.
About INNORES
Today, as technological innovations are seen as foundational to the future development of contemporary societies, the entanglements of innovation and society require closer scrutiny more than ever. INNORES offers a novel, empirically and theoretically rich approach to do so through a radically switched perspective. It does not put innovations themselves centre-stage, assigning to residues the role of potentially disruptive side-effects, but takes residues as the lens to study democratic innovation societies. It investigates how societies conceptualise, make sense of, live with, and care for innovation residues, and how this shapes their relations to innovation. Studying innovation societies through the complex networks and manifestations of residues, INNORES opens up new perspectives on how local choices and global impacts relate, on intergenerational justice and responsibility, on whose future imaginaries, values, and knowledges count when making choices, on how benefits and risks are distributed, and on modes and infrastructures of care for environmental futures.
Nuclear Waste
Nuclear waste is in many ways the icon for residues that bring complex longue-term environmental futures with them. Promises that technical fixes will solve the problem have been circulating for three quarters of a century. There is a rich body of literature on aspects such as protests, trust and participation around nuclear waste facilities, or regulatory efforts.
Microplastic
Microplastics designate small plastic pieces entering the environment either as fibres, microbeads, or fragments of larger plastics. They are the residue of a technological innovation – plastic – that fundamentally transformed our lives. While first reports on microlastic in our oceans already appeared in the 1970ies, the notion of microplastics was only coined in 2004 and gradually became a matter of concern.
Data Waste
Data waste/waisting is a new category of residue created through digital innovations which INNORES wants to reflect on as a not-yet-fully acknowledged 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.
Latest news & events
MA thesis defensio by Anastasia Nesbitt
It was a pleasure to see our first piece of research in the INNORES project to come to a perfect end. Great MA thesis on the roles of datastewards and a really excellent performance at the defensio. The supervisor was and is really proud!
EASST/4S Conference “Making and Doing transformations” Amsterdam, 16-19 July 2024
We are back from a great week at the EASST/4S Conference “Making and Doing Transformations” in Amsterdam. It was a great event, smoothly organised, very inclusive, offering lots of opportunities to connect and really stimulating – and all this with more than 3000 participants. The organisers did a really great job. We presented no less than 5 papers on diverse aspects of our project.
How to engage with invisible left-behinds of innovations? (Ulrike Felt, Sara Ortega and Livia Regen)
Between classification and measurement: the politics of monitoring microplastics in wastewater (Noah Münster)
Decommissioning as a practice of caring and waiting: turning the French graphite-moderated reactors into waste (Ange Pottin & Ulrike Felt)
Collateral transitions. Reassembling Societies, Data Centers and the Twin Transition (Carsten Horn & Ulrike Felt)
Choreographies of knowledge, concerns and responsible care in narratives of innovation residues (Michaela Zuckerhut & Kaye Mathies)
Now enjoying some summer holidays …. and then writing things up.
Workshop on European Commission’s Policy Making (24-26 June 2024)
Three days of intensive presentations and discussions on the European policy dimensions with regard to innovation residues with Nicole Dewandre who has been working in the European Commission for 40 years. It was a great experience to discuss some aspects of our policy analysis.