Innovation Residues – Modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures

Introduction

Innovation residues designate those left-behinds of innovations that profoundly shape human lives as they stay with us for a long time—well beyond moments of production and consumption, and well beyond the time horizons considered when assessing the worth of innovations. Residues are material witnesses to the culture and practice of innovation, to diverse politics at work, and to the limited attention to long-term sustainable futures in a world predominantly shaped by short-term impact thinking.

Context

Today, as technological innovations are seen as foundational to the future development of contemporary societies, the entanglements of innovation and society require closer scrutiny more than ever. INNORES offers a novel, empirically and theoretically rich approach to do so through a radically switched perspective.

Approach

It does not put innovations themselves centre-stage, assigning to residues the role of potentially disruptive side-effects, but takes residues as the lens to study democratic innovation societies. It investigates how societies:

1. Conceptualise innovation residues
2. Make sense of them
3. Live with them
4. Care for them

This investigation shapes their relations to innovation. By studying innovation societies through the complex networks and manifestations of residues, INNORES opens up new perspectives on:

• How local choices and global impacts relate
• Intergenerational justice and responsibility
• Whose future imaginaries, values, and knowledges count when making choices
• How benefits and risks are distributed
• Modes and infrastructures of care for environmental futures

Focus Areas

INNORES engages with three very different kinds of residues:

1. Nuclear waste
2. Microplastics
3. Data waste

Using a specifically tailored qualitative, comparative mixed-method approach, it investigates them in different arenas spanning three European countries and the EU. Studying these particular sites in detail will then allow tracing out connections to and implications for innovation societies more generally.