Stellenangebot: 2 Postdocs and 2 PhD candidates (4 years) for the ERC Adv Grant “Innovation Residues” in Vienna

INNOVATION RESIDUES – Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures (INNORES)

PI: Ulrike Felt

1 January 2023 – 31 December 2027

Innovation residues designate those left-behinds of innovations that profoundly shape human lives as they stay with us for a long time–well beyond moments of production and consumption, and well beyond the time horizons considered when assessing the worth of innovations. Residues are material witnesses to culture and practice of innovation, to diverse politics at work, and to the limited attention to long-term sustainable futures in a world predominantly shaped by short-term impact thinking.

INNORES is a multi-sited and comparative project engaging with three very different kinds of residues – nuclear waste, microplastics, and data/digital waste (a not-yet considered category of left-behinds). Using a specifically tailored qualitative mixed-method approach, it investigates them in different arenas – policy, expert, and civic arenas – spanning three European countries – Austria, Ireland, and France – and the supranational EU level. Studying these particular sites in detail will then allow tracing connections to and implications for innovation societies more generally.

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. INNORES offers a novel, empirically and theoretically rich approach to do so through a radically switched perspective. It does not put innovations themselves centre-stage, assigning to residues the role of potentially disruptive side effects, but takes residues as the lens to study democratic innovation societies. It investigates how societies conceptualise, make sense of, live with, and care for innovation residues, and how this shapes their relations to innovation. Studying innovation societies through the complex networks and manifestations of residues, INNORES opens up a new perspective:

• on how local choices and global impacts relate,
• 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.

The work will draw on and contribute to the lively STS debates about, among others, responsible innovation, experimentation, and matters of care; orders of worth and valuation constellations; assemblage theories, multiplicity, and coordination; and imaginaries, anticipation and caring for our futures.