CfP: FAILURE IN SCIENCE: CONTEXT, IGNORANCE AND THE FUTURE OF FAILING, December 12-14, 2022, Hannover
Programme (CLICK HERE )
“Failure in Science” was being held as part of the broader Thematic Week “Failure Matters”, a funding initiative of the Volkswagen Foundation.
The active participants were offered the opportunity to engage with preeminent figures and pioneers in failure and contemporary science studies. They met with representatives of research networks on failure now in the making at the global level, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. The thematic week included a wide range of themes and experimented with a variety of meeting formulas, ranging from the traditional panel, to research salon and even the nonconventional F*** up Tales event, where the participants shared and analyzed stories of failure in science.
The results of the meeting will be published online and open access.
Thematic blocks
The symposium covered three general themes and a so-called F*** up Tales event.
– Cultures of failure in science: Dimensions and interferences
– Failure and the overcoming of vulnerabilities and neglect in science
– Science, failure, and the future
The first thematic block, cultures of failure in science, unraveled the particularity of scientific regimes of success and error, and how these interact with non-scientific imaginaries and lack of institutional trust. It indicates recent research on acknowledging failure and ignorance as resources of dynamism and innovation. Exploring how the communication setbacks of science (as in the case of COVID-19) further trigger recomposition of imaginaries of failure and science in contemporary society. The block discusses the context of ignorance mechanisms, imaginaries, and projections. In particular, it analyzes how the social positions of social agents influence failure expectations, especially with regard to gender, class, and race. The impact of the socio-technical systems and technological advancements that imaginary of science and failure is embedded in. The influence of calculation, algorithmization, materiality and temporality on the recomposition of everyday scientific communities and emergence of new failure and success norms in science.
The second thematic block, failure and the overcoming of vulnerabilties and neglect in science, revisited calls for redefining failure, for promoting new imaginaries that are associated with critical failure studies coming from architecture theory, globalization studies, performance theory, queer theory and disability studies. The thematic block tackles the possibility of redefining and recomposing ignorance and failure that would have an impact in terms of the democratization of science. It explores the limits of redefining failure, as well as the possibility to re-imagine the role of science in society. To find value in the failures and drawbacks that develop lack of trust in science, and to open pathways and search for new forms of communicability.
The third thematic block, on science, failure, and the future, explored how innovation and progress in science co-evolve with epistemologies and imaginaries of failure now in the making. Innovation builds on failure and there is a symbiotic relationship in which failure occurs as a resource of new discovery and possibility of avoiding mistakes in the future. In the same time, science meets education as a domain where new confrontations with failure are reevaluated and constructed. Education occurs as the most dynamic domain where science of failure is now in the making in a manner in which also intersects with socialization in new models of failure.
The symposium also engaged with an informal session of scientists sharing stories of failure in science, the F*** up Tales event. Upon the model of F**** Up Nights, or more conventional events of sharing stories, or Fail Festivals, the participants were invited to share stories of failure and analyze organizational and institutional paths of reacting to scientific error and lack of conventional success.
Organizers
Organizers: Matthias Gross (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena/Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig), Adriana Mica (University of Warsaw), and Mikołaj Pawlak (University of Warsaw).