Propping up interdisciplinarity: responsibility in university flagship research

Abstract

Researchers' communication activities are influenced by motivations and abilities, but also by specific topics and artefacts of research. This is seldom acknowledged in efforts to embed responsible research and innovation in organizations through mechanisms that promote communication as synergistic activities. Nor is it sufficiently acknowledged in the literature on researchers' attitudes to communication. To open up a discussion on this issue, we draw on recent literature on affordances to explore how a certain 'prop' influences outcomes of research communication in the NTNU Cyborg initiative, which integrates biological neural cultures with electronic circuitry and robotics to build a cybernetic organism. The case illustrates the wide range of affordancesboth enabling and constraining featuresthat a particular object of communication may have in different settings, indicating the need for artefact-specific approaches to researchers' attitudes to communication and to the institutionalization of RRI.

Responsible innovation in scientific practice: prospects, tensions and the long game

“…Each of these various sites and settings provide opportunities to engage scientific 'responsibility practices' in light of broader governance contexts and concerns. As Gjefsen and Vie (2021) state in this issue, responsible innovation proceeds by insisting not only on public engagement but also 'that dialogue and reflection should inform technical practice' in order 'to extend civic capacity and deliberation to the hegemonic spaces of technical experts.' Thus in this issue we visit an assortment of scientific fields, governance themes and scholarly objects of attention ranging from imaginaries, identities and materialities to futures, ethics and games.…”

“…The third article brings an often overlooked dimension of responsible innovation into clearer view. Emphasizing 'the inseparability of the technical and the social' that informs responsible innovation frameworks, Gjefsen and Vie (2021) examine the understudied role of materiality in shaping researchers' responsibility practices, in this case in a Norwegian university's flagship cyborg initiative. Drawing attention to the importance not only of scientists' attitudes and motivations in affecting 'whether and how communication and public engagement contributes to responsible research and innovation,' but also the materiality of the artifacts with which they work, the authors set out to examine 'how objects of research influence the contexts and outcomes of communication.'…”

Critical support for different stages of innovation in agriculture: What, when, how?

“…A need to know more about involvement in processes becomes particularly clear in light of the normative ambitions increasingly being built into research and innovation activities via mechanisms for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) (Owen et al, 2012). RRI seeks to mitigate unintended negative effects and maximise the benefits of innovation by incorporating a multitude of voices and perspectives early inand throughoutresearch and innovation processes, including agenda-setting and need-mapping stages that precede technical development; moreover, and critically, RRI demands that deliberative and participatory activities have a meaningful influence on the directions of technical trajectories (Gjefsen and Vie, 2021). However, while RRI has increasingly been incorporated into funding and support mechanisms on the EU level and within national funding regimes (Shelley-Egan et al, 2020), it has been more challenging to operationalize RRI in innovation contexts characterized by geographically and organizationally distributed activities and where different actors, interests, and support mechanisms are at play at different stages of the innovation process (Stahl et al, 2021), such as in Norway's fragmented agricultural sector.…”