Critique in, for, with, and of responsible innovation

Abstract

Critique has been a central theme in Responsible Innovation and Responsible Research and Innovation (R(R)I). R(R)I promises to critique dominant technocratic and economic regimes by conducting critical analysis, promoting critical reflection, and launching critical interventions to democratize science, technology, and innovation. However, the sheer success of R(R)I as a policy concept promoted by influential international organizations, a measure to satisfy consumer demands in tech companies, and a pedagogical program advertised to students, suggests that its critical impetus has been curbed by the institutions it sought to confront. Tasked with enacting critique within the dominant regimes it aims to challenge, R(R)I finds itself in a double bind. This collection probes the role that critique has played and could play in R(R)I. Fourteen contributions shed light on the multiple ways in which critique has been conceptualized, performed, and debated in R(R)I, and they discuss how critique could be reclaimed and become more generative for the responsible governance of science, technology, and innovation. Taken together, the contributions indicate that critique is as flexible as R(R)I’s scholarly styles, that it operates in different modes and across each of these styles, and that more consciously cultivating such difference provides generative responses to R(R)I’s double bind.

Keywords

• Critique
• reflexivity
• power
• responsibility
• research
• innovation