Future Organisms

Publications

(Book) A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration

Calvert Jane. (2024). A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration. United States: MIT Press Ltd.

Abstract:

An exploration of science and technology studies in eight different places, and the possibilities that arise for observation, intervention, and collaboration.

Where does science and technology studies (STS) belong? In A Place for Science and Technology Studies, Jane Calvert takes readers through eight different rooms—the laboratory, the conference room, the classroom, the coffee room, the art studio, the bioethics building, the policy room, and the ivory tower—investigating the possibilities and limitations of each for STS research.

Drawing from over a decade of work in synthetic biology, Calvert explores three different orientations for STS—observation, intervention, and collaboration—to ask whether there is a place for STS, which, as an undisciplined field, often finds itself on the periphery of traditional institutions or dependent on more generously funded STEM disciplines.Using examples of failures and successes and tackling enduring concerns about the relations between social scientific researchers and their fields of study, Calvert argues for an approach to STS that is collaborative yet allows for autonomy.

Multispecies approaches to keeping RRI weird

Szymanski, E (2024). Multispecies approaches to keeping RRI weird. Joint Society for Social Studies of Science and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology annual meeting. Amsterdam.

Abstract

I present a brief case for keeping RRI fluid, shaken up, and weird by taking a multispecies approach to social needs, response-ability, and personhood. In one sense, multispecies RRI is a wholly serious proposal. For RRI and other modes of science governance to account for the potential shapes of livable futures, more-than-human interdependencies must be recognized. Society must be defined to include all creatures whose needs and interests matter—to flourishing futures, and to care-full presents. Principles that are well-developed in multispecies studies, including relationality, kin, and care, productively contribute to the kinds of conversations that social scientists often aim to convene through RRI. At the same time, the idea of multispecies RRI tends to scamper in playful, experimental, unsure, weird directions. It becomes necessary to address sincere questions—questions with well-crafted answers in multispecies studies—that still sometimes meander into schoolyard or stoner territory, such as: what does becoming able to respond to a rose bush entail? A raven? A rock? Using the motto “Keep RRI Weird” as a topoi to address the serious business of doing ridiculous things, I argue that multispecies approaches can and should contribute to sedate policy discussions, and that play, irony, and even silliness may be essential in asking earnest questions about whose abilities to respond matter.

Controlled flailing: Reducing harm in STS methods

egret, c (2024). Controlled flailing: Reducing harm in STS methods. Joint Society for Social Studies of Science and European Association for the Study of Science and Technology annual meeting. Amsterdam.

Abstract

Undergirded by a reflective narrative on a recent international, interdisciplinary workshop on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Fort Collins, Colorado, I think through how more sympoietic event-hosting methods reduce harm from entrenched assumptions about what counts as “professional” and “knowledge”. Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and her framing of the notion of ‘autopoiesis’ (being self-made and contained) as a story – not a biological given – and adding Haraway’s notion of ‘sympoiesis’ (making & being made-with) reminds us that it matters what stories we use to stage our professional selves, events and theories with. Moving from the impulse to operationalize responsibility, to sitting with response-abilities, required us to deviate from many typical STS workshop conventions; it required us get a bit weird. What happened when we performed this sort of controlled letting go, surprised us. The workshop became a creature itself – a performative, tentative creaturely assemblage – that asked us to “listen” in the sense that Alexis Pauline Gumbs invokes, as “the radical act of slowing down and tuning in” while staying with the trouble of “how?” and “to whom?”. This paper comprises an attempted translation, a “controlled equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro) of what this creature taught us, woven with a story of what we did; on how amplifying response-abilities (not just responsibility), serendipity and embodiment, while dampening the impulse to center autopoietic futures, technologies, and professional identities, enabled us to perhaps reduce the harm that comes from assuming what STS methods must look like and do.

Mismatched and misaligned: responsibility narratives in American research labs for synthetic biotechnologies.

Hey, Maya. (2024). “Mismatched and misaligned: responsibility narratives in American research labs for synthetic biotechnologies.” Journal of Responsible Innovation, https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2024.2355682

Abstract

This article examines what responsibility means in the context of synthetic biotechnologies, based on academic researchers in the American west who are using/developing synthetic biology, engineering biology, and synthetic genomics. Advancements in technical capacity are ushering in imminent/current possibilities of creating whole genomes/organisms from scratch, yet extant narratives about ‘responsibility’ have neither been fleshed out, nor compared against normative frameworks (such as ELSI and its critiques). Through empirical data collection (e.g. discourse analysis), this paper examines interviews with biotechnologists (N = 16) to analyze responsibility narratives on the ground, which include: being responsible towards grand challenges, national values, and research relations involving other beings in the lab, both human and more-than-human. The analyses presented here offer feminist and multispecies critiques for studying the relational webs of responsible (response-able) research and concludes with a discussion about the mismatch between how responsibilities are narrativized across different actors within academic research institutions.

Beyond control

Szymanski, E., Evans, J., and Frow, E. (2024). Beyond control. GROW magazine. https://www.growbyginkgo.com/2024/03/28/beyond-control/

Exploring the value of a global gene drive project registry

Taitingfong, R.I., Triplett, C., Vásquez, V.N. et al. Exploring the value of a global gene drive project registry. Nat Biotechnol 41, 9–13 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-022-01591-w

(Book) From Terrain to Brain: Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine

Szymanski. (2023). From Terrain to Brain: Forays into the Many Sciences of Wine. United States: Oxford University Press Inc.

Abstract:

Wine connects people and places, but also ways of making knowledge across and beyond natural and social sciences. Biochemistry and microbiology, fluid dynamics and plant pathology, human physiology and cognitive psychology, and virtually every other scientific discipline brings its own lens to understanding what wine is, each useful for different purposes. Looking through one lens ultimately invokes others, so that they anastomose around wine as a social, cultural, and scientific phenomenon. Unfortunately, “the science of wine” is often presented as trivia to memorize: a set of facts about what wine is, from a set of limited disciplinary perspectives. Instead, this popular wine science book approaches the many sciences of wine as a set of diverse tools for appreciating and enjoying more of what wine can be. Each chapter begins with a common wine concern—sugar, alcohol, glass, etc.—and makes a foray out across the many sciences of wine to synthesize ways of understanding it. Ultimately, the book aims to locate scientific research in the wider social context of how wine is made and enjoyed, all in pursuit of expanding avenues for enjoying both science and wine.

The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy

Bernstein MJ, Franssen T, Smith RDJ, de Wilde M. (2023). The European Commission’s Green Deal is an opportunity to rethink harmful practices of research and innovation policy. Ambio, 52(3), pp. 508-517. doi: 10.1007/s13280-022-01802-3

Abstract

The European Union’s Green Deal and associated policies, aspiring to long-term environmental sustainability, now require economic activities to ‘do no significant harm’ to EU environmental objectives. The way the European Commission is enacting the do no significant harm principle relies on quantitative tools that try to identify harm and adjudicate its significance. A reliance on established technical approaches to assessing such questions ignores the high levels of imprecision, ambiguity, and uncertainty—levels often in flux—characterizing the social contexts in which harms emerge. Indeed, harm, and its significance, are relational, not absolute. A better approach would thus be to acknowledge the relational nature of harm and develop broad capabilities to engage and ‘stay with’ the harm. We use the case of European research and innovation activities to expose the relational nature of harm, and explore an alternative and potentially more productive approach that departs from attempts to unilaterally or uniformly claim to know or adjudicate what is or is not significantly harmful. In closing, we outline three ways research and innovation policy-makers might experiment with reconfiguring scientific and technological systems and practices to better address the significant harms borne by people, other-than-human beings, and ecosystems.

Communicating With the Microbial Other: Reorienting humans and microbes in polylogue

Hey, M. (2023). Communicating With the Microbial Other: Reorienting humans and microbes in polylogue. Global Media Journal – Canadian Edition, 15(1), pp. 11-25.

Abstract

What does it mean to communicate with the trillions of microbial beings that comprise our bodies and surroundings? Microbes are incomprehensible—or so the narrative has been to sidestep an engagement with them. Additionally, microbes are “invisible,” and unlike other organisms, they are ubiquitous, unruly, and necessary for our thriving. This paper uses other examples of communicating with incomprehensible others (e.g., machines, infants, and other species) for insights on how to still engage in communicating with microbes. To theorize human-microbe communications, this paper specifically focuses on fermentation practices to disentangle the material-discursive and ethico-political aspects of human-microbe encounters through food (e.g., pickling, breadbaking, sake-brewing). It draws on the work of John Durham Peters to reorient humanmicrobe communications towards polylogue, where many speak and many hear simultaneously. Doing so shifts the problem away from assessing the accuracy of the intended microbial message (“what are they saying?”) and towards one of assuming a self-reflexive disposition (“how can I position myself to best ‘hear’ what is being said?”). It is a reorientation of how we-humans might attune to and listen for others’ cues. The issue of incomprehensibility, then, might be better held as a reality to accept than a challenge to overcome, and that accepting this reality comes with a set of responsibilities for living in an imbricated, more-than-human, highly microbial world. This paper contributes to both food studies and communication studies by expanding the analytical frame beyond representations and significations of food/microbes in media to instead analyze how ferments mediate relations.

Catalysts of Open Education in Colorado A Qualitative Study of Enabling Forces in OE Momentum

Hey M. (2023). Catalysts of Open Education in Colorado A Qualitative Study of Enabling Forces in OE Momentum. Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, (1), doi: 10.13001/joerhe.v2i1.7651

Abstract

What are/were the catalysts that enabled Open Education (OE) momentum in Colorado, and what can be gleaned from its origin stories? Using a mix of qualitative methods (e.g. interviews, narrative analysis, discourse analysis), this paper maps the forces, both actual and imagined, that enabled OE to flourish across the state. This paper locates patterns specific to Colorado and analyzes the interdependent and interpersonal aspects of the OE movement/philosophy there. It arrives at the conclusion that two themes in particular (state-level support and community characteristics) contribute to Colorado’s reputation as an OE leader. Rather than view these as distinct forces, the two themes entwine and synergistically enhance the other. This paper contributes to growing research in the area of second-order OE thriving and sustainability. It makes the case that, while identifying barriers to OE can assist with action-oriented research, identifying the enabling forces can also offer a more nuanced understanding in a particular place: less of the bad is one tactic, more of the good is another.

Governing beyond the project: Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding

Smith RD, Schäfer S, Bernstein MJ. (2023). Governing beyond the project: Refocusing innovation governance in emerging science and technology funding. Social studies of science, pp. 3063127231205043. doi: 10.1177/03063127231205043

Abstract

This article analyses how a recent idiom of innovation governance, ‘responsible innovation’, is enacted in practice, how this shapes innovation processes, and what aspects of innovation are left untouched. Within this idiom, funders typically focus on one point in an innovation system: researchers in projects. However, the more transformational aspirations of responsible innovation are circumscribed by this context. Adopting a mode of critique that assembles, this article considers some alternative approaches to governing the shared trajectories of science, technology, and society. Using the idea of institutional invention to focus innovation governance on four inflection points—agendas, calls, spaces, evaluation—would allow funding organizations and researchers to look ‘beyond the project’, developing new methods to unpack and reflect on assumed purposes of science, technology, and innovation, and to potentially reconfigure the institutions that condition scientific practice.

Conversations with Other-than-Human Creatures: Unpacking the Ambiguity of “with” for Multispecies Rhetorics

Szymanski E. (2023). Conversations with Other-than-Human Creatures: Unpacking the Ambiguity of “with” for Multispecies Rhetorics. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, (2), doi: 10.1080/02773945.2022.2095423

Abstract

Multispecies rhetoric functions as an umbrella for diverse approaches to more-than-human communications that invoke distinct varieties of relations among human and other creatures. Amid that diversity, rhetorical engagements in which all creatures “speak” with others in mutual, iterative exchange can become lost. My argument is, first, that this particular variety of multispecies conversation is rare in discussions of multispecies rhetoric because rhetorical engagement “with” other creatures is often underspecified, and because it is incompatible with Aristotelian foundations that still often underpin rhetorical inquiry; and second, that it should be cultivated so that humans can invite other creatures to be more interesting than the anthropoexceptionalist lens may suggest, such that we can accomplish more together. A multispecies rhetoric wherein humans speak with other creatures, not only speaking for, about, or around them, requires drawing a distinction between capacities to affect/be affected and assumptions about any creature’s internal state of mind.

Following the organism to map synthetic genomics.

Hey, M and Szymanski, E (2022) Following the organism to map synthetic genomics. Biotechnology Notes 3: 50-53

Abstract

Synthetic genomics, or engineering biology at the level of whole genomes and whole organisms, is an emerging outgrowth of parts-based synthetic biology. This nascent subfield is also diverse and difficult to characterize. As social scientists investigating responsible research and innovation in synthetic genomics, we suggest that focusing on the organism is a fruitful approach to making sense of the diversity it encompasses. Here, we offer a heuristic in the form of a tagging system to organize projects by the roles the engineered organism is asked to perform. We suggest several reasons why this system is useful for understanding the current shape and future directions of the field, especially in light of the need to ask: how does engineering biology contribute to building a future of sustainable relationships with other creatures?

Symbiosis and the Steward: Reading Human-Microbe Relationships and Restorying Convivial Futures. Synthesis

Hey, M. (2022). Symbiosis and the Steward: Reading Human-Microbe Relationships and Restorying Convivial Futures. Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 15, pp. 6-28.

Abstract

The human-microbe relationship spans millennia of use, hope, and tension. And the recent discovery of microbiomes and their uncanny influence on human agency is re-storying what it means to be human in a microbial world. What if the stories we inherited about human-microbe thriving were obsolete, and what new ways of storying can we imagine with microbes? The roles we play in these stories—like that of a stewarding or partnering with microbes—can lead to certain power configurations and assumptions about control. At the same time, stories of symbiosis, or ‘living with’ microbes, can assume mutual benefit where there is none and obfuscate other configurations such as commensalism and parasitism. It seems then that our pre-existing attempts to describe the human-microbe relationship butt against stories of multispecies survival. Conviviality may be one way to re-story the human-microbe relationship as it centres eating relations without presuming humans as the only ones feasting. This essay attempts a critical reading of concepts such as symbiosis and stewardship by comparing examples from media, philosophy, and popular discourse to analyse how we imagine, represent, and live with microbes in the contemporary moment, given our entangled futures.

Reconfiguring the challenge of biological complexity as a resource for biodesign

Szymanski, E and Henricksen, J (2022) Reconfiguring the challenge of biological complexity as a resource for biodesign. mSphere DOI: https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00547-22

Abstract

Biological complexity is widely seen as the central, intractable challenge of engineering biology. Yet this challenge has been constructed through the field’s dominant metaphors. Alternative ways of thinking—latent in progressive experimental approaches, but rarely articulated as such—could instead position complexity as engineering biology’s greatest resource. We outline how assumptions about engineered microorganisms have been built into the field, carried by entrenched metaphors, even as contemporary methods move beyond them. We suggest that alternative metaphors would better align engineering biology’s conceptual infrastructure with the field’s move away from conventionally engineering-inspired methods toward biology-centric ones. Innovating new conceptual frameworks would also enable better aligning scientific work with higher-level conversations about that work. Such innovation—thinking about how engineering microbes might be more like user-centered design than like programming a computer or building a car—could highlight complexity as a resource to leverage, not a problem to erase or negate.

A turn to the organism in synthetic biology?

Erika Szymanski and Jane Calvert (2021). A turn to the organism in synthetic biology?. International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology annual meeting. Online.

Responsible research and innovation meets multispecies studies: why RRI needs to be a more-than-human exercise.

Szymanski, E, Smith, R and Calvert J (2021) Responsible research and innovation meets multispecies studies: why RRI needs to be a more-than-human exercise. Journal of Responsible Innovation 8 (2): 261-266.

Abstract

We offer an argument for why responsible research and innovation should be in conversation with multispecies studies. We suggest that RRI can learn from multispecies studies to expand definitions of stakeholders and responsibilities, thereby including other creatures in conversations and frameworks where they are currently missing. In addition, the RRI community might benefit from exploring conceptual overlaps between RRI and multispecies studies literatures. For example, concepts germane to RRI – notably, care and relationality – have been particularly well-developed with respect to how they oblige mutually responsive relationships. Consequently, connecting these two areas of theory and practice should nuance discussions about responsibility as an individual versus a collective endeavor and about the relationship between RRI and knowledge production.

Working Publications

Automatic reply: another university is possible

Reuben Message, Jane Calvert, and Rob Smith ‘Automatic reply: another university is possible’ in Davies, S et al. (Eds) Revisiting Reflexivity: Liveable Worlds in Research and Beyond’ Bristol: Bristol University Press

Constructing Sites: Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Erika Szymanski, cookie egret, Jane Calvert, Robert Smith, Koichi Mikami ‘The living room’ in Fitzgerald, D and Woods, A (Eds) Constructing Sites: Surveying Scenes of Interdisciplinary Collaboration London: Bloomsbury

The soba restaurant and the oyster bar: peripheral spaces for responsible research and innovation

Smith, R, Kawamura, K, Szymanski, E, Shineha. R and Calvert, J ‘The soba restaurant and the oyster bar: peripheral spaces for responsible research and innovation’ for East Asian Science Technology and Society

Responsible research and innovation as long-term collaboration: STS involvement in artificial intelligence in Japan and synthetic biology in the UK

Ema, A and Calvert, J ‘Responsible research and innovation as long-term collaboration: STS involvement in artificial intelligence in Japan and synthetic biology in the UK‘ for EASTS

An invitation to help redecorate a corner of discursive space

Szymanski, E. “An invitation to help redecorate a corner of discursive space,” in an edited collection on reflexive methods for livable worlds, edited by Sarah Davies et al., in development with Bristol University Press.

More-than-human responsible research and innovation: A proposal for keeping RRI weird

Szymanski, E., Smith, R., egret, C., Mikami, K., and Calvert, J. More-than-human responsible research and innovation: A proposal for keeping RRI weird. In development.

Indirect human engineering: On the value of reconsidering human-nonhuman distinctions in synthetic genomics

Szymanski, E. Indirect human engineering: On the value of reconsidering human-nonhuman distinctions in synthetic genomics. In development.

Negotiating Expectations in Genome Synthesis: Glocal Insights and Local Resistance in Japan

Sugawara, Y. & K. Mikami “Negotiating Expectations in Genome Synthesis: Glocal Insights and Local Resistance in Japan” (working title), In preparation.

How Japanese Microbiology Met Synthetic Biology: Situating Postgenomic Narratives in the Historical Context

Inokuchi, T. “How Japanese Microbiology Met Synthetic Biology: Situating Postgenomic Narratives in the Historical Context” (working title), In preparation.

Saving the World with or without the Microbe?: How insufficiency becomes a rhetorical resource for research

Mikami, K. “Saving the World with or without the Microbe?: How insufficiency becomes a rhetorical resource for research” (working title), In preparation.

Partial Agitations: responsible innovation as placemaking in a scientific conference

Stone, S.A.R and Smith, R. ‘Partial Agitations: responsible innovation as placemaking in a scientific conference. In development’ (working title). Manuscript in preparation.

(Book Chapter) An invitation to help redecorate a corner of discursive space. Revisiting reflexivity: STS methods for livable worlds

Szymanski, E. An invitation to help redecorate a corner of discursive space. Revisiting reflexivity: STS methods for livable worlds. Bristol University Press. (Under review)

(Book Chapter) The Living Room. Constructing Sites: Sites for collaboration in medical humanities

Szymanski, E., egret, c., Calvert, J., Smith, R., and Mikami, K. The Living Room. Constructing Sites: Sites for collaboration in medical humanities Fitzgerald, Des, and Creager, Angela. Bloomsbury.