David Thomas, a Ph.D. candidate in the Production of Literature program, will deliver a paper at the end of August at the Petrocultures conference at the University of Glasgow (Scotland). David’s paper, “Social Lab, Social Struggle: Politicizing the Social Innovation Paradigm,” will be featured on a panel devoted to “Scalar Predicaments in Energy Politics.” It explores what Isabelle Stengers calls the possibility of “another science”—a science pried free of the grip of monopoly capital, and rendered answerable to ‘the test of general interest. Stengers has highlighted the French experiment with “citizen juries” as prefiguring one possible approach. David’s paper “proposes that the policy-driven rollout of a global network of public-private ‘city labs’ might provide Stengers’s questions a more efficacious set of institutional entry points. For while a common or public stake in commercial R&D labs has proved difficult to define and leverage in practice, it will be harder for such ambiguities to prevail around the ‘social lab,’ which claims to take our cities as the object of its experimental activity. The changes will become too palpable, the interested parties too numerous, and too close to hand.”
Fundamental to the prototyping strategies of the social lab, David contends, “is the concept of scalability—the notion that localized experiments might be conducted in such a way as to render their results systemically disseminable. Adopting the prototyping tactics of industrial R&D labs, and applying them to the problem of megacity systems change, proponents of social innovation theory claim to apply an ‘iterative’ approach, one whose recursive flexibility allows them to steer a course beyond the longsighted rigidity of planning paradigms and the flexible but myopic strategies of marketization theory. In particular, they suggest that the lab’s freedom to attempt local, real-time prototyping responses will equip it to deal with the unpredictable cascade effects and feedback loops that characterize anthropogenic climate change.”
David sees the virtue of this logic, but worries that “without a broader-based public understanding of these objectives, left to its own devices the social lab could easily come to serve as the staging ground for of a new batch of greenwashing schemes and kleptocratic land-grabs.” How to cut this eventuality off at the pass? In probing this question, his paper asks what role humanists and social scientists might play in catalyzing a vital civic struggle, one that will entail making the social lab’s experimental practice answerable to the test of general interest.
Find out more about the conference here.