Anticipation and its degrees of critical-reflective radicality: opening up the affordances of engaging with futures to problematize STI

ABSTRACT

Anticipation is increasingly recognized as a valuable dimension for promoting more responsible STI practices. Various normative frameworks acknowledge anticipation as a means to enable critique and/or reflection. However, the degrees of critique and reflection that anticipation can or should enable have remained under-researched. By exploring the critical-reflective affordances that anticipation could offer for problematizing STIs in the present, this article aims to advance the theoretical development of anticipation as a dimension for promoting more responsible STIs. The article suggests that the potential critical-reflective radicality of anticipation is modulated by the critical-reflective spaces of problematization and/or scrutiny afforded by the normative frameworks in which anticipation is interpreted and for which it is enacted. Against this background, the article provides some tentative variables for assessing these critical-reflective affordances and specifies the roles that different modes of anticipation might play in opening up distinct, interconnected aspects of STI to problematization and/or scrutiny.

KEYWORDS:

• Anticipation
• foresight
• responsible innovation
• critique
• affordances

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Guest Editors Mareike Smolka, Tess Doezema, Lucien von Schomberg, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. I also thank Simon Mussell for his work in copy-editing this article. This work was developed during my time as a Research Fellow of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, funded by the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NOW grant number 024.004.031).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to note that AG, RRI, RI, and TA have varying degrees of explicit integration of anticipation as a key procedural dimension. While AG, RI, and newer TA approaches explicitly recognize anticipation as a key procedural dimension, RRI’s explicit mention of anticipation is not consistent. However, some prominent proponents of RRI, such as René von Schomberg, acknowledge that RRI ‘creates the possibility for anticipatory governance’ and associate RRI with anticipating ‘positive and negative impacts or, whenever possible, defin[ing] desirable impacts of research and innovation’ (von Schomberg 2013, 65) through technology assessment and foresight (see also von Schomberg 2012, 51–52). In addition, there are instances where RRI is encouraged to incorporate the procedural dimensions of RI: ‘anticipation,’ ‘responsiveness,’ ‘reflexivity,’ and ‘inclusion’ (e.g., Commission 2013, 57–58; van de Poel et al. 2017, 5–6). However, Owen and Pansera (2019) argue for differentiating between RRI and RI.

2 According to Grunwald (2002, 124), the term ‘classical TA’ is problematic as it fails to acknowledge the actual heterogeneity of early forms of understanding and practicing TA. It misleadingly suggests that all TA practices were uniformly characterized by (i) a division of labor between science and politics, (ii) a statist orientation, (iii) an emphasis on quantification, (iv) reliance on experts, and (v) a strong emphasis on technological forecasting.

3 The contemporary literature in A&FS legitimately distinguishes between ‘anticipation’ and the practices of ‘foresight’ and ‘forecasting’ (Poli 2019a, 2019b). However, this distinction has not always been clear (Poli 2021, 2–3). While forecast and foresight involve specific techniques for constructing and engaging with future models, anticipation goes a step further by translating their heuristics into action. ‘Put briefly, forecasting deals with data extrapolation, foresight with the visualization of possible futures, and anticipation with their translation into action’ (Poli 2021, 3). However, since the main objective of forecasting and foresight exercises in STI governance is to guide actions and/or enhance our capabilities, these terms are often used interchangeably in this context.

4 Foresight is now regarded as the main terrain of Futures Studies, but its epistemic foundations and pragmatic orientations are heterogeneous. Positions range from the claim that foresight should tell us something (albeit tentatively) about the not-yet, to the argument that it should remain technically ‘futureless’ in spirit (see Samet 2010; Sardar 2010). The latter perspective assumes that the future does not exist (ontological claim) and therefore we cannot look into it (we can only imagine it) (epistemic claim). Everything we do, then, is to engage with models that represent imaginations of the future that we, as socio-epistemic actors, contextually and contingently co-create and evaluate with our available resources.

5 When using the term ‘anticipation,’ each normative framework refers exclusively to a subset of all possible kinds of anticipatory practices. Each STI normative framework delineates its set of anticipations considered valid or useful based on its respective goals and normative visions.

6 Just as we can differentiate between extrospective and introspective modes of reflection, we can similarly distinguish between extrospective critique (where the object of critique is external to the system performing the critique) and introspective critique (where the system performing the critique is both the subject and the object of the critique). Introspective forms of critique are typically referred to as ‘self-critique.’ The relationships between extrospective or introspective reflections and extrospective or introspective forms of critique can take many forms. For example, the heuristics resulting from the introspective reflection of ethnographers on their own underlying values, conditions, and assumptions can later serve as a substrate for the enactment of both self-critique (e.g., the same ethnographers criticize their own previously self-scrutinized features) and/or critique (e.g., ethnographers can share the results of their reflexive endeavors and, once accessible to and accepted by other actors, these other actors can subject these findings to critique). Similarly, the heuristics resulting from the extrospective reflection of ethnographers on the epistemic cultures and values of nanoscientists can later serve as a substrate for the enactment of both critique (e.g., the same ethnographers may criticize these epistemic cultures and values and/or prescribe the desirability of articulating nanoscience in alternative ones) and/or self-critique (e.g., the ethnographers may share the results of their reflexive efforts with the nanoscientists scrutinized and, once accessible to and accepted by them, they may subject their own features to critique).

7 Since works of art can trivially be considered objects external to the subject conducting the examination or critique, the example of the fine art analysis guide is a hypothetical case of an artifact that prompts extrospective reflection and/or critique. A comparable instance in the context of introspective reflection and/or critique would be a guide for ethnographers to conduct a more reflexive and self-critical ethnography. Davies’s (1999) guide, for example, invites ethnographers to open up to scrutiny a number of dimensions of their professional practice, such as the choice of topics and methods, modes of observation, participation, interviewing, structuring the research, formalizing the analysis, etc. All these points would denote the extensional radicality or breadth of the spaces of reflexivity or self-criticism that the guide affords. The intensional guide’s radicality is manifested in the depth in which each of these elements is encouraged to be scrutinized and/or problematized.

8 Please note that to suggest that STI normative frameworks have a generic primary identity established by basic characterizations typically found in written texts does not imply that only those STI governance practices and capacities that have been shaped by the interventive practices associated with these normative frameworks can align with such generic identities. For example, Conley (2020) illustrates how governance practices that were not and could not be influenced by AG can be seen as latent forms of ‘proto-AG.’ However, recognizing these practices as latent forms of ‘proto-AG’ requires assuming a specific set of components of AG that are outlined in some of their respective foundational texts: ‘The anticipatory governance concept is comprised of three different components – foresight, engagement, and integration, and are outlined in Barben et al. (2008)’ (Conley 2020, 508).

9 Recognizing that (anticipatory) intervening practices are conditioned by the affordances of the frameworks with which they are associated should not lead to the misunderstanding that the theoretical and/or empirical affordances of intervening practices simply mirror the theoretical affordances of the frameworks they serve. Each normative framework defines a theoretical space of critical-reflective affordances. The expected critical-reflective affordances of its associated intervening practices will be situated with varying degrees of coupling to this previously theoretically defined space. The critical-reflective affordances empirically or de facto enabled by each intervening practice may, in turn, deviate more or less from the expected affordances of the interventions. Ultimately, the degree of openness or closure empirically afforded by anticipatory intervening practices will depend on many aspects (e.g., the design of the exercise, how it addresses the dynamics of closure that prevail in the socio-theoretical system in which it operates) (Urueña, Rodríguez, and Ibarra 2021).

10 One might ask whether critical-hermeneutic engagements with futures can constitute a mode of anticipation. In response, it should be noted that it is possible to inform action and activate capacities through these analytical-deconstructive engagements with futures models, thus complying with the basic definition of anticipation initially provided (see Example 4 at the beginning of section 2). Indeed, A&FS often consider foresight promoting analytical-deconstructive engagements as anticipatory means of developing criticism and futures literacies (Inayatullah 1990, 1998; Miller and Sandford 2019). The critical-hermeneutic mode of engaging with future models can be identified in those STI normative frameworks that position anticipation as a tool to generate critique or reflection about circulating visions and promises around STI (e.g., alluding to the need to conduct vision assessments and/or hermeneutic TA) (see Table 1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Education of the Basque Government through a Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Improvement of Research Personnel [grant no POS_2022_1_0001], the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the Spanish State Research Agency [grant no PID2020-114279RB-I00], and the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU [grant no GIU21/063].