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. However, while most research efforts focus on understanding and shaping how (fields of) innovations emerge and expand, INNORES offers a novel, empirically and theoretically rich approach to study innovation through a radically switched perspective. It takes the left-behinds (the afterlives of innovations) – which we conceptualise as INNOVATION RESIDUES – as the lens to study how innovation societies conceptualise, make sense of, live with, and care for these innovation residues, and how this shapes their relations to innovation. INNORES will investigate the different modes of caring for innovation residues, and the infrastructural arrangements that are (not) being put in place to address the longue-durée futures these residues create. Studying innovation societies through the complex networks and manifestations of residues, INNORES will shed light on the complex evaluative balancing acts between innovation choices and their immediate futures on the one hand, and innovation residues and their long-term futures, on the other. It opens new perspectives on how local choices and global impacts relate, on modes of justification when it comes to embrace innovations, 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.

INNORES is a 5-year research project at the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Vienna. It is led by Ulrike Felt and supported by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).

Objectives

In order to answer the central research question

How do contemporary democratic societies in the European context conceptualize, make sense of, live with, and care for long-term innovation residues, and how does this shape their relations to innovation?

we use a comparative residue-centred approach. INNORES will thus:

• offer a novel way to understand and theorize about innovation societies through the lens of long-term residues;
• provide insights into the multiplicity of situated performances of residues, and the actions needed to connect and align them in order to be able to envisage sustainable actions;
• create a better understanding of the valuation practices of different actors/groups of actors when assessing areas of innovation through the lens of residues;
• explore the role of the temporal dimensions of innovation residues and conceptualise the place of longue-durée environmental futures in the ways we decide about, relate to and govern innovations;
• elaborate an empirically grounded understanding of modes and infrastructures of care and responsibility for innovation residues and long-term environmental futures (aim: challenge the often rather narrow managerial approaches);
• develop and implement a specifically tailored qualitative comparative mixed-method approach (comparative assemblage ethnography) allowing for a fine-grained analysis of innovation relations.

Fields of inquiry: Three Residues to Follow through Innovation Societies

The three residues at the center of the INNORES project – nuclear waste, microplastic and data waste – all stem from major fields of innovations that shape our societies since mid-20th century. They were chosen due to their different histories and materialities, all having long-term impacts. Yet, they are governed in different ways and the modalities and infrastructures of care are fundamentally different. For all of them we will thus see how matters of fact are gradually transformed into matters of concerns and potentially into matters of care.

Nuclear waste

Nuclear waste is in many ways the icon for innovation 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. Studies, however, rarely pose the wider questions of how innovation choices relate to the challenges of nuclear waste – which has become more important as we currently witness a “nuclear renaissance.” Furthermore, the focus, so far, has been mainly on high-level waste from nuclear power plants, paying little attention to how we deal with low and intermediary level nuclear waste from industry, research institutes, medical applications, from dismantling nuclear power plants or from extraction sites of nuclear resource material. INNORES will specifically investigate the large amounts of mid- and low-level nuclear residues (waste to be monitored and safeguarded for 300 years), which are a challenge to all European countries having to put in place final disposal sites. Countries needing to dismantle nuclear powerplants will produce massive amounts of this waste which will colonise space within nation state boundaries.

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 since the post-war period. While first reports on microlastic in our oceans already appeared in the early 1970ies in scientific journals, the notion of microplastics was only coined in 2004 and gradually became a matter of concern. As microplastics are found in the remotest corners of the world, have entered human bodies through the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat, this residue has become a focus of research on the environmental imapcts. 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, the pathways are still under investigation 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, will accumulate and stay with us for a long time, potenitally transforming into nanoplastics with yet different potentially toxic impacts.

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 (practices), e.g., the potential impact of omnipresent big data visions and the extractive systems by which data are to be 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 and more data based information extraction systems seems to have become unsatiable, it is time to make space for critical reflections on the long-term impacts of our data practices. And for the “bodies of data” to remain accessible and usable they need constant care using impressive amounts of resources with high environmental impacts. Not only electricity and water should be mentioned, but servers contain large amounts of steel, aluminium, and plastic (three materials heavily responsible for industrial greenhouse gas emissions), as well as copper, gold and multiple critical raw materials often coming with high environmental impacts. And data practices have become important contriutors to our rising CO2 levels. Therefore, we investigate how actors draw the line between data as valuable resource and data (practices) as waste/wasting as well as how they assess the infrastructural needs for our data practices and the extractive industries that build on this massive collection, circulation and use of data. Data waste/wasting is thus a category of residues yet to be characterized, described, made meaning of, reflected upon, and taken care of.

Methodological approach: A comparative assemblage ethnography

We embrace assemblage thinking as a way to investigate innovation residues. This allows to make visible the processes of socio-material transformation, on the ways in which heterogeneous entities – human and non-human – come together and become entangled. Assemblage thinking is interested in the processual character of how entities come together to form a stable (even if sometimes only temporarily) whole. This means that INNORES centres on studying how both innovation societies and innovation residues are assembled across time and space, with specific attention to how diverse sets of actors, longue-durée futures, regulatory devices, norms, and emotions, and many more come together and stabilise. However, at specific moments in time some of these ties in the assemblage can become fragile, leading to destabilisation and the demanding work of reassembling both the fields of innovation and their residues. It is exactly these moments which will be of central interest.

Using an ethnographic approach and embracing ethnographic sensibilities when entering the field is the most adequate way to address the core concerns of INNORES. The project will characterize its ethnographic understanding by what we will actually be doing, by the sorts of data we collect, and the by kind of analysis we will deploy with those data.

Comparison will be achieved through

• three kinds of innovation residues: nuclear waste, microplastics, and data waste.
• three national contexts (France, Ireland and Austria) and the supranational level of the European Union.
• different arenas of debate: policy, expert and civic arenas.

Comparison allows us to be attentive to diverse modalities of difference and to forge new connections between residues, human actors, 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.

Conceptual approach