The Knowledge Transfer Office together
with the Master’s program in Business Economics ΤΙΜΕ-ΜΒΕ, organize
the 7^th Webinar entitled “The Ubiquity of Urgency and the Limits of RRI”.

The presenter is Professor Stephen
Hilgartner, Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell
University. 

The webinar will take place on Tuesday 14 March, at 17:00.

To attend the webinar:
https://uoc-gr.zoom.us/j/84597107176?pwd=QzI2WUF2VnlSQkhHejRySE9BY2c3UT09

Abstract: The exigencies of managing emergencies stand in tension
with the goals of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and its vision of
wide-ranging anticipation, unfettered reflexivity, stage-gated commitments, and
inclusive deliberation. Large-scale emergencies arguably produce especially
sharp tensions between urgency and RRI. But a constructivist perspective that
asks how situations come to be defined as “urgent” suggests that
claims about the urgency of innovation during widely recognized emergencies are
the tip of a very large iceberg. Innovation-is-urgent claims are ubiquitous,
and actors advance them in a variety of institutional spaces for many reasons.
This paper argues that innovation-is-urgent claims play a wide role in
constricting—and at times opening up—possibilities for RRI. How, then, do some
of these claims become credible and consequential? Under what circumstances do
they succeed in narrowing the focus of attention, making time short, winning
resource commitments, delegating decisions to small groups, shortcutting normal
procedures, and justifying states of exception? This paper explores these
questions by examining the control of knowledge in situations defined as
urgent. It argues that in such situations, knowledge-control regimes (KCRs)
play an important role in shaping the possibilities for the kinds of
deliberation that RRI envisions. By KCRs, I refer to legal or lawlike
arrangements that configure entitlements and burdens pertaining to knowledge, a
category that includes but is not limited to intellectual property regimes.