STS has, in recent years, seen the foregrounding of concepts of care in attempting to understand the constitution of of socio-technologies, as in, for example, the work of scholars like Annemarie Mol and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa. Despite the explicit attention such research pays to temporality, connections between care and technoscientific futures remain under-explored. This paper addresses this issue by re-appraising the connections between care, socio-technologies and futures, drawing on phenomenology, the ethics of care, and objects-relations theories to explore the relationship between practices, technologies and complex subjectivity. Performing the future in the present, it is suggested, constitutes and is constituted by specific temporal relationships between past, present and the not-yet through which subjects exercise care for the future. These relationships can be lost, in certain circumstances, in the products of the performance itself, in the quest for socially-valorized and desired 'disembedded' knowledge of futures, as manifested in demand forecasts, cost-benefit analyses, profit projections and so on. I explore how restoring an appreciation for the 'artisanal' performance of futures is essential to how innovation, and indeed governance of innovation, can be re-embedded in society as part of the broader goal of reconstructing the contract between technoscience and the societies that depend on it. Normative dimensions in STS, as addressed by recent developments such as responsible innovation ('taking care of the future' through the stewardship of technoscience, according to Stilgoe, Owen & Macnaghten, 2013), are thus brought back into the analytical frame.

1. Care and STS: re‐embedding
socio‐technical futures
Dr Christopher Groves (Social Sciences, Cardiff, UK)
grovesc1@cf.ac.uk
4S/EASST 2016, Barcelona, 31 August – 3 September

2. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

4. Now: t=0 Future: t=n

5. Care and STS
RRI
• Innovators’
responsibility to
‘care for the
future’
(Macnaghten,
Owen and
Stilgoe 2013)
• Make socio-
technical
innovation more
responsive/
inclusive
AnnemarieMol • The Logic of
Care (2008):
care as temporal
structure
• Subjective
capability
mediated by
devices &
infrastructures
• Involves
narrative –
based practical
reasoning
MariaPuigdelaBellacasa
• Care as
interdependence
• ‘Ontological
constraint’ not
ethical
imperative
• Potential basis
of ‘somatic
ethics’ for STS

6. Influence of the ethics of care
RRI
• Make innovation
more responsive
to broader range
of societal needs
• Ethical
framework:
virtue ethics
rather than
consequentialist
• Participatory
governance of
technoscience in
face of
uncertainty
AnnemarieMol
• Care is co-
constructed
• Transactional
relationship
between carer(s)
and cared-for
• Care anticipates
concrete futures
through
production of
narratives
‘[…] people themselves
(can) have knowledge
about their own
subjectivity; in principle
they are competent to
express who they are
and what they need. It
takes seriously people's
stories about what they
need to live well’
Selma Sevenhuijsen, 1998

7. Influence of the ethics of care
MariaPuigdelaBellacasa
• Care as
interdependence
• ‘Ontological
constraint’ not
ethical imperative
• Emphasis on
interdependence as
survival
constraint for bios
• Interdependence as
expression of
principle of
symmetry
‘[Care is] everything that we do to
maintain, continue and repair “our
world” so that we can live in it as
well as possible. That world includes
our bodies, ourselves, and our
environment, all that we seek to
interweave in a complex, life
sustaining web.
Fisher & Tronto, 1993
‘In that sense, as permaculture
care ethics consider, humans are
not the only ones caring for the
earth and its beings – we are in
relations of mutual care.’
De la Bellacasa, 2010
‘[Earthworms] take
care of our waste,
they process it so that
it becomes food
again.’
De la Bellacasa, 2010

8. Being care-full about care
• Threat of flattening
relationships
• Interdependence is not
identical to care
• Tronto/Mol underline that
care implies particular modes
of subjectivity: attentiveness,
responsiveness
• These need to be understood
explicitly as future-
orientated/ anticipatory

9. Opening the debate: care and
futures
• Heidegger: care as future-oriented
temporal structure of human being
• Ethics of care adds concreteness
/relationality
• Care is a relational capacity
through which we live
interdependence, orienting us
towards singular futures
• Concern for material needs but
also for what those cared for might
come to be and be able to do
‘All active ethical life is
concerned with
foresight, is a life lived
in the future and for the
future. That is the
defining essence of
ethical activity.’
Nikolai Hartmann, Ethik
(1926), p. 485

10. Subjectivity, attachment, meaning
• Care implies investments
in singular futures
▫ People, non-humans,
places, institutions,
practices, ideals
• Life is more than
survival;
interdependence is more
than that through which
we survive
‘The meaning of our lives cannot,
therefore, be understood as a
search to satisfy generalizable
needs for food, shelter, sex,
company and so on, as if our
particular relationships were
simply how we had provided for
them. It is more the other way
round: without attachments we
lose our appetite for life.’
Peter Marris, 1996

11. Caring for self and place
“We've got nothing, we're a very, very quiet
area, we've never had anything, the only
thing we've ever had is the fact that we're
rural, that you can walk outside your door
and you're in country, you're in total
country”
“Anna”, Neath Port Talbot
Dulais Valley, Neath Port Talbot

12. Caring for ideals & technologies
‘I hope we will not lose all sense of striving for the
future or of interest in the undiscovered, nor
refuse to make any journey unless every step can
be counted and measured in advance. The road to
successful and economic power stations is
uncharted. I hope we can maintain our resolve to
continue the exploration. ’
Sir John Hill, then head of the UK
Atomic Energy Authority , 1971 (from Welsh, 2000)

13. Towards a politics of care
in STS
“In the global resource wars, the
environmentalism of the poor is
frequently triggered when an
official landscape is forcibly
imposed on a vernacular one”
(Nixon, 2011: 17)

14. Re-embedding socio-technical
futures
• How do socio-technical assemblages and
subjectivities participate together to constitute
care for singular futures?
• What individual and collective investments can be
traced, and how are they shaped by
▫ subjective /collective capabilities (attachments,
knowledges, affect)
▫ practices and equipment
• What political effects follow from such
investments?

15. Thank you for your attention
http://cardiff.academia.edu/ChristopherGroves
grovesc1@cf.ac.uk