Scientific research, technological innovation and the agenda of social justice, democratic participation and sustainability

Abstract

Modern science, whose methodologies give special privilege to using decontextualizing strategies and downplay the role of context-sensitive strategies, have been extraordinarily successful in producing knowledge whose applications have transformed the shape of the lifeworld. Nevertheless, I argue that how the mainstream of the modern scientific tradition interprets the nature and objectives of science is incoherent; and that today there are two competing interpretations of scientific activities that are coherent and that maintain continuity with the success of the tradition: "commercially-oriented technoscience" (CT) and "multi-strategy research" (MS). The greater part of this article is devoted to discussing what is involved in MS, by pointing to its positive research program in three areas ("social technology", agroecology and food sovereignty), and its critical stance towards the innovations of CT, especially insofar as it makes use of the Precautionary Principle. In this way important dimensions of the agenda of science and technology for social justice, democratic participation and sustainability become clear.

Decolonizing Philosophy of Technology: Learning from Bottom-Up and Top-Down Approaches to Decolonial Technical Design

“…That also happens when traditional or popular knowledge produces effects hitherto non-explainable by the available technical-scientific knowledge (Eglash, 2019, p. 241-244;Smith et al, 2017, p. 65-66). In all these cases, a dialog of knowledge allows technical-scientific knowledge to be enlarged either by understanding or explaining something unknown before or by studying the reality in a more contextualized or ecosystemic way and according to general guiding values other than control increasing and profit maximization (Lacey, 2014).…”

Food and Agricultural Systems for the Future: Science, Emancipation and Human Flourishing

“…This needs to be emphasised, for sometimes proponents of reforming the hegemonic system, e.g., FAO, ignore this dimension and treat agroecology as one of the methods of 35 family farming that can be incorporated into that system, just one among many sustainable, organicLacey 2005, ch. 3;Lacey 2014b;2014c. 30Lacey 2005, ch. 7;2014c.…”

Assessing Grassroots Engineering Applications in Brazil

“…To address this point, we must acknowledge that, as presented elsewhere [1]: a) every technical challenge can usually be addressed through different technical solutions; b) each technical solution necessarily favors or emulates some (set of) ethical-political values over others; c) because of "a" and "b," society and technology shape one another in a way that d) technical development and engineering production are things to be democratized, to be disputed, in the case of GE, by grassroots' needs and (critically taken) values and worldviews. This means that technical knowledge (not to mention science [31]) can be enlarged, allowing for the democratization of technical development and, with that, for the construction of this other possible socio-technical world that the 90% might dream about. Changing our social reality is not only a matter of political fight for institutional transformations.…”