STS after the participatory turns. A (self-)critical appraisal

STS after the participatory turn
“Participation has been a key theme in Science and Technology Studies (STS) research for half a century now. In this paper, we argue that STS sensibilities have increasingly (and inadvertently) tended to produce a blindness to institutional political action, extending and organizing the forgetting of part of what underpins a democratic society. While the so-called ‘participatory turn’ of the 2000s was oriented towards a reconstructivist engagement with policymaking and the development of serviceable STS entering the ‘policy room’ (Webster 2007, Felt and Wynne 2007), more recent enactments of and debates around participation seem more detached from, or even disinterested in, the values and institutions of representative democracy (Delvenne and Macq 2020). The flight forward and away from traditional democratic institutions (e.g., parliaments) to embrace the burgeoning informal, citizen, material, digital, mundane, everyday participation, etc., has a price to pay, analytically and politically. To be sure, the enthusiasm for “remaking participation” (Chilvers and Kearnes 2015; 2020) has enabled very significant progress, allowing for an approach less rigidly bound by ‘best practices’ to be implemented or the obsession with institutionalization. However, it has also had the side effect of preventing STS scholarship from using its analytical and critical resources to rethink and rebuild representative democracy along with participatory democracy, moving away from and outside of any representative democratic life and aspirations.”