Innovation in Conditions of Stagnation: Thinking from the Fourth Quadrant
Dates: | 7 June 2021 |
Times: | 15:30 - 17:00 |
What is it: | Seminar |
Organiser: | Alliance Manchester Business School |
How much: | Free |
Speaker: | Dr Stevienna de Saille |
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Join us for Manchester Institute of Innovation Research Seminar Series 20/21, webinar hosted by guest speaker, Dr Stevienna de Saille, Research Fellow in the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the University of Sheffield.
Register to attend via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/manchester-institute-of-innovation-research-dr-stevienna-de-saille-tickets-152512331489
Innovation in Conditions of Stagnation: Thinking from the Fourth Quadrant
Abstract:
Responsible innovation (RI) was originally conceived as a way of shaping innovation towards filling real social needs, rather than towards merely increasing profits and GDP. However, the process of embedding of RI into science funding policies, such as Responsible Research and Innovation in the EU, has instead strengthened the very same growth paradigms it was meant to challenge. Initially presented as a matrix which contrasts responsibility with irresponsibility and innovation with stagnation, the quadrant representing responsible innovation has been much discussed, while that of responsible stagnation has gone largely unexplored. Taking this ‘fourth quadrant’ seriously gives us a means to question the political economy in which RI is embedded and to consider innovation in its broadest sense, including non-market oriented goods and services which provide social and environmental benefits but do not contribute to GDP. In this talk, I will examine how incorporating this fourth quadrant -- as a necessary component of RI, not an argument against it -- can facilitate truly novel approaches to crucial questions about maintaining social progress within our planetary limitations.
Stevienna de Saille is a Research Fellow in the Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman) at the University of Sheffield, where she studies the intersection of science, technology and society. She has published widely on topics ranging from feminist movements to responsible innovation, with a concentration on reprogenetics and robotics as technological fields. Stevie is also the author of two monographs, the most recent of which is Responsibility Beyond Growth: A case for responsible stagnation, published last summer by Bristol University Press and written as a collaboration between seven STS and economics scholars, all members of the Fourth Quadrant Research Network (of which she is a founder). She has been a co-chair of the Postgraduate Forum on Genetics and Society (PFGS), a co-coordinator of the Science and Technology Study Group of the British Sociological Association (BSA), and is presently on the Editorial Advisory Panel for Science as Culture. Stevie is also a certified facilitator in LEGO® Serious Play® methodology, which she uses for her own research and teaching as well as for strategic consultation on embedding RRI in science and engineering projects. She is presently using this methodology to research imaginaries of robotic care as Co-I on a UKRI/Trustworthy Autonomous Systems pump-priming project.
Speaker
Dr Stevienna de Saille
Role: Research Fellow
Organisation: Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman), University of Sheffield
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