Public engagement in contested political contexts: reflections on the role of recursive reflexivity in responsible innovation

This special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation interrogates the political cultures and practices that render engagements among publics, emerging technologies, and institutions both deeply problematic yet increasingly necessary. In the process, each of the contributions touches on the theme of asymmetries – whether between rulers and ruled, decisionmakers and stakeholders, or engagers and those they would engaged. With research that spans a decade and cuts across a variety of theoretical, geographic, and technoscientific contexts, the case studies and perspectives in this issue shed light on such asymmetries by exploring changing notions of responsible innovation amid a host of political, cultural, and epistemic contestations. While approaches to public engagement and deliberative democracy as means for cultivating responsible innovation have faced legitimate scrutiny and critique, the need for collective responsibility in innovation and governance more broadly is dire. In a time of global pandemic, extreme political polarization, anti-science populism, anti-black racism, and other political, public health, and economic crises, what lessons might we now glean from both this past decade and recent social movements for theorizing responsible innovation moving forward?

Responsible Innovation (RI) constitutes a vibrant and varied set of responses to a host of challenges concerning the alignment of science and technology with societal values, often engaging implicitly with what Sheila Jasanoff refers to as three myths of technology and society: technological determinism, technocracy, and unintended consequences (Jasanoff 2016). In recent years, many have taken up variations of RI into diverse social, political, geographic, and technoscientific contexts, and in doing so, have identified questions and concerns regarding RI assumptions, implementations, goals, and limitations. The articles in this special issue continue in this rich and dynamic conversation about RI, and resonate with Erik Fisher’s assessment that

2020 … symbolically marks the beginning of what will likely be redoubled efforts among scholarly, practitioner, and policy communities to rethink what counts as responsible innovation in scientific, technological, economic, social, and political contexts and endeavors. (Fisher 2020, 2)

More specifically, we argue that, to the extent that RI can or even should be implemented in a particular context, those initiating such efforts have an obligation to practice reflexivity in a recursive manner by applying their conceptual and normative tools upon themselves as well as their subjects.

Accordingly, the articles in the special issue on ‘Asymmetries: Public Engagement in Contested Political Contexts’ suggest that those theorizing and enacting RI need to themselves anticipate the potential challenges, failures, and negative consequences of the RI implementation. Similarly, they need to critically interrogate and conceptualize inclusion in ways that are informed by an awareness of power dynamics, different axes of inclusion, and histories of exclusions. RI scholars and practitioners alike should also consider and be transparent about the possibilities and limitations of responsiveness, accounting for the possibility that these limitations may be so great that the only responsible response might be to abandon the research or innovation project itself from the outset. Finally, those committed to RI should always already be reflecting on who and what RI is for, how it may fall short of its ideals, to what extent even its ideals must be opened up to critical reflection, and to what extent both ‘responsibility’ and ‘innovation’ might continually need to be decentered from their popular meanings in the interests of justice and power asymmetries. Taken as a whole, the special issue reminds us that RI is an aspiration that recursively turns on itself to responsibly innovate its own approaches to ensure that its practices and principles are responsibly incorporated into broader innovation projects.

As STS scholars located within the United States, we view RI strategically as an opportunity to bring a critical, interventionist orientation into spaces of power, of asymmetries, directly–spaces of corporate, academic, and/or state innovation–and indirectly, through practices that take up the imperative to include more voices into those spaces of power. On the face of it, RI takes two terms that STS and critical theorists have variously taken issue with–responsibility, which has been critiqued as an individualizing and narrow construction dominant within neoliberal configurations that shift responsibilities from the state to citizens (Brown 2015); and innovation, which in addition to being an overused term associated with hype, has largely been defined through an economic lens as something novel that confers benefit through its translation via the market (Greenhalgh and Rogers 2010; de Saille and Medvecky 2016). Indeed, RI scholars and practitioners are – like those of its close neighbor Technology Assessment – keenly aware of the burdensome challenges their aspirations involve (Van Est 2017). The economic framing of innovation in particular conflates economic success with public good and conceptualizes the market as the primary arbiter of morality (Parthasarathy 2017). In the process, it tends toward contradictory views of innovation as either an unmitigated good (Blok and Lemmens 2015) or as a value-neutral enterprise (Papaioannou 2020).

Whether taken separately or together, ‘responsible innovation’ runs the risk of being seen as a rather bland configuration built on universalizing assumptions about homo oeconomicus as its subject and consumer. Despite, or perhaps because of this risk, it is a term that potentially travels well, particularly within STEM education, which provides an avenue for RI- and STS-inflected interventions in spaces that are formative for shaping dominant conceptions of responsibility and innovation. As such, responsible innovation needs to be taken up strategically and with great care as it navigates the all too familiar shoals of impact and cooptation. To this end, the special issue explores how the aims of critical intervention can aid RI endeavors in subverting the dominant tendency to conceptualize innovation in universal and economic terms and instead to critically engage with the myriad accompanying asymmetries. Keeping in mind that ‘Responsible Innovation’ is ‘hardly a consolidated approach’ (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016, 111), by taking up and defining it in terms of a robust framework that includes generally accepted dimensions such as reflexivity and inclusion, RI can not only travel into these spaces, but also work toward realizing the possibilities it contains within itself for imagining a more just, flourishing, democratic society.

This issue explores the imperatives and limitations of RI in light of reflections on asymmetries, in what we are calling the ‘recursive reflexivity’ of responsible innovation. While the well-known ‘AIRR’ framework of anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness, and reflexivity (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013) remains a key approach to RI, these very same dimensions of praxis can be continually taken up – as RI scholars have already done (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016; Brand and Blok 2019; Hartley et al. 2019)–to interrogate RI on both theoretical and pragmatic levels. Stilgoe et al. define reflexivity at the institutional level as ‘ … holding a mirror up to one’s own activities, commitments and assumptions, being aware of the limits of knowledge and being mindful that a particular framing of an issue may not be universally held’ (2013, 1570). While the special issue contributors speak to cultivating reflexivity within contexts of science and technology governance–from the laboratory to research funders and other governance institutions–their conversations implicitly highlight the ways that STS and RI scholars engaging the work of responsible innovation are operating within these contexts, not outside them. That is, reflexivity is not only to be cultivated among scientists, policymakers, and the stakeholders explicitly shaping science and innovation, but in the STS/RI researcher as well. Recursion in the context of computer programming, from which we are borrowing, generally refers to an instance in which a function–which contains steps to execute–calls itself. Here, by metaphor, we posit that RI calls itself. Anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness, reflexivity and other dimensions (Fraaije and Flipse 2020) and approaches (Pellé 2016) to RI are not just elements of a heuristic framework for cultivating responsible innovation but are principles for reflexively examining RI practices themselves and attendant questions concerning democratic engagement with science and technology.

We suggest that recursively reflexive RI can identify and critique dominant knowledge forms concerning innovation, technocracy, and even democracy while enacting the meaningful change it seeks to bring about through its interventions. This potentially aligns it well with STS approaches of ‘critical participation’ and ‘STS making and doing’:

STS making and doing is … a mode of scholarship that involves attending not only to what the scholar makes and does but also to how the scholar and the scholarship get made and done in the process. On the one hand, this entails examining how STS scholars and scholarship actively engage the settings they study or otherwise enter, including the agents that occupy them (Hackett et al. 2008; Sismondo 2008), asking such questions as what consequences does STS scholarship have in these settings, and might STS notions help STS scholars determine whether and how their work may or may not bring value to those settings? On the other hand, it involves reflecting critically on how the work and identities of STS scholars are constructed in the process. (Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak 2017, 225)

Viewing RI as a practice of critical participation highlights the ways that scholars and practitioners must be open to the ways that RI does or does not enact value in a particular configuration; the ways in which they themselves are constituted in the practices of engaging RI; the ways in which they are not only teaching but also learning from the scientists, policymakers, publics, and other stakeholders engaged in a particular setting; and finally, what power, resource or other asymmetries may characterize the contexts within they seek to intervene. It further reaffirms the non-neutrality, non-beneficence and non-linearity of innovation.

Recursive reflexivity, then, encompasses the ways in which RI contains within itself the possibilities, and perhaps the imperative, for always re-imagining itself. It brings together questions that have hitherto only been asked in a dispersed way throughout the scholarship on RI; questions such as: How do the conceptual underpinnings and assumptions of RI translate in different political cultures and contexts in light of diverse contextual asymmetries (Doezema et al. 2019)? To what extent does RI genuinely engage power dynamics and critically imagine epistemic and other forms of inclusion (Valkenburg, Pandey, and Bijker 2020)? How does RI recognize, understand, and respond to its own failures (Lee et al. 2019)? Who is RI for and what exclusions has it enacted, intentionally or otherwise (Van Oudheusden 2014)? Under what circumstances is responsible innovation not responsible (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016)? Under what circumstances is RI asking the wrong questions (Nordmann 2014)?

Thematic summaries of contributions

This special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation more specifically concerns the ways that attending to asymmetries, in a spirit of recursive reflexivity, illuminates the relationships among publics, emerging technologies, and institutions across a variety of democratic states and political cultures and, in doing so, raises important questions about how we might better understand the imperatives and limitations of RI. How might engagement serve to build capacity for responsible innovation, when responsible innovation itself is ‘interpretively flexible, culturally framed and politically entangled?’ – and perceived by many in non-Western contexts as informed and influenced by predominantly European values and priorities (e.g. Macnaghten et al. 2014; Wong 2016)? Responsible innovation and accompanying engagements with various publics become further complicated when situated within state-wide socio-technical imaginaries and political imaginations (Jasanoff and Kim 2013) that either tacitly or explicitly drive development of socio-technical systems. If deliberative engagements are to be considered a prerequisite for RI (Reber 2018), the question remains: how do such interventions manifest across diverse governance frameworks, power inequities, and opposing perspectives of what consists of ‘good technology’ or ‘good knowledge’ (Jasanoff 2016)?

The papers within this collection delve into the evolving nature of public engagement and deliberation, and the accompanying promises and pitfalls, against reconfigurations of broader relationships between the public and the state. The critiques and analysis offered in this issue are set against an historic atmosphere in which significant ‘asymmetries between rulers and ruled’ have prevailed, and matters of science governance within the state are often blackboxed and distant from general publics (Jasanoff 2016, 259). They are also set within a moment in which the imperative is urgent to address power dynamics, exclusions, and structural injustices that both shape innovation and within which new innovations get taken up. As scholars have repeatedly noted, RI frameworks and accompanying capacities, such as public engagements, have primarily focused on the global North (Macnaghten et al. 2014; Wong 2016; De Campos et al. 2017; Doezema et al. 2019; Hartley et al. 2019; Reyes-Galindo, Monteiro, and Macnaghten 2019). This special issue continues to bring much needed attention to contexts within the global South where priorities for RI and modes of knowledge production may offer new contexts. For example, analyses within this issue examine contexts such as India and Brazil, where the authors grapple with questions such as: What is, and what should be, the role of experts and institutions, as societies grapple with emerging and unprecedented crises? How are publics participating in and shaping national conversations around emerging technologies? The research articles and perspectives explore and critique, both empirically and normatively, the role and contested contexts of public engagement, the challenges of inclusion and power disparities, the problematics of implicit assumptions about progress and public good, and the weight of institutional and systemic dynamics within which RI and STS endeavors might be simply insufficient as correctives.

Across three research articles and six perspective articles, themes include critiquing the promise of engagement in light of power disparities, capitalism, and globalization (Thorpe 2020); examining modes of deliberation and cultures of trust across geopolitical contexts (Macnaghten and Guivant 2020; Haines 2020); questioning epistemic inclusion and the limitations of responsibility within system systems of oppression, injustice, and exclusion (Macnaghten and Guivant 2020, Williams 2020, Monteleone 2020); interrogating technocracy and the ellipses of values within technocratic systems (Kennedy 2020; Sadowski 2020; Wienroth 2020); and engaging RI to facilitate the travel of STS sensibilities into STEM education (Tomblin and Mogul 2020).

Research articles

Phil Macnaghten and Julia Guivant urge STS scholars to assess models of public deliberation in the context of the political cultures within which they are taken up. Reflecting on and re-engaging research they conducted in 2008–2009 (itself an example of recursive reflexivity) that compared national cultural differences in public responses to nanotechnology in Brazil and the UK, they make visible the locally situated histories and values that must be recognized in any normative account of responsible innovation (Macnaghten and Guivant 2020). They show that public deliberation in the UK has developed in response to a loss of trust in scientists and a broad pessimism regarding the ability of status quo institutional arrangements to align scientific progress with public values. However, the relative trust Brazilian participants demonstrated with respect to scientific actors and their relative optimism regarding the promise of technological progress together lead to very different needs and desires regarding governance. This reflexive turn to interrogate their own earlier research highlights the value of examining narratives and narrative resourcing as a way to learn and adapt RI to local, situated contexts, and to better inform what RI might be or might need to be in order to be grounded and provide value within the context of the political culture(s) within which it is enacted. Importantly, they ask: ‘In the context of emerging economies and democracies, what is the role of the STS scholars as active players in their co-construction?’ (15) Questioning the limits of merely adopting a static RI framework or assuming that public engagement as such is needed or desirable, they consider the ways that narrative analysis might lead toward alternative configurations of RI.

If Macnaghten and Guivant highlight the import of political cultures in attuning RI to epistemic inclusion, Monamie Bhadra Haines drills down into the complexity of multiple political cultures operating within a single nation state, where various groups with different histories, identifies, frames of reference, and values, experience ‘political-epistemological crossfire.’ Examining the case of anti-nuclear resistance in India, she demonstrates that the framework of civic epistemologies is insufficient to understand the flux of political and epistemic orders co-created through different registers and practices of resistance. She asks: ‘What happens when the subaltern of the political society transgress their prescribed roles of negotiating monetary and livelihood compensation, and begin adopting rationalities of risk and safety that is the long-standing platform of urban, anti-nuclear activists of civil society?’ (3). Demonstrating that the role of science and scientific knowledge may not be as central to the ways that controversy and negotiation are enacted within this ‘political-epistemological crossfire’ as assumed in much STS and RI scholarship in other contexts, she argues that only with a ‘reflexive and humble politics of knowledge’ in which subaltern imaginaries are included and all participants are open to the possibility of mutual transformation can an inclusive national civic epistemology develop (15).

While Macnaghten and Guivant identify a need to reflexively open up and adapt RI to achieve epistemic inclusion, and Bhadra Haines seeks to expand more limited views of the role of scientific knowledge in governing technologies, Charles Thorpe questions the very possibility of responsible innovation without challenging the centrality of the market in mediating the relations of science, technology, and society. Critiquing the promise of participation as a mode of democratizing science and technology, he suggests that it fails not just because it runs up against differential power dynamics but because it leaves intact the underlying principle of private property that is central to science and technology within all forms of capitalism. He argues that when STS fails to challenge capitalism and the private means of production, it is ‘caught in the intractable dilemma of Third Way politics’ –attempting to realize progressive ideals without undertaking broader structural change (Thorpe 2020, 2). Moreover, while the inherent contradiction between public participation and private property could in theory be addressed through institutionalized democratic planning, attempts at such planning on the national level run up against the private means of production on a global scale. He writes that,

The concentration of economic power and its unfettered exercise across all domains of life comes into direct conflict with aspirations toward reflexivity. This conflict translates into the inability of globalized capitalist industrial production to regulate itself at the global scale. (Thorpe 2020, 3)

Within a context of climate change crisis, and the weakening of Third Way governments and international law, Thorpe urges STS and RI scholars to endeavor to imagine alternative political-economic realities as a matter of necessity.

Perspective articles

This special issue also includes six perspective pieces that examining practices and limitations of both innovation and responsible innovation within contexts of wildfire management, forensic genetics, health domains, surveillance technologies, and STEM pedagogies. These shorter articles raise important questions about technocratic practices of RI, about whose futures are deemed to matter when considering inclusion, the complex histories and systemic contexts within which a technology may be developed and adopted when examining responsibility, and the ways that negotiations about values can become eclipsed or overly abstracted when attempting to align technologies with societal goals. The collection concludes with a specific focus on engaging RI to engage STEM students in STS ways of thinking. Given that pedagogy is a particular focal area of JRI, we encourage our readers to read each of these perspective pieces with an eye toward their potential utility in engaging students–including undergraduate STEM students–in learning about STS and RI concepts. Their short format and clear delineation of concepts and critical questions serve not only to probe important tensions and put forward new perspectives regarding RI, but would serve as insightful resources for STS and RI pedagogy.

Jathan Sadowski highlights the different frames with which risk is understood by scientific experts and regulatory authorities as compared to lay publics. While STS has attempted to answer the challenges of technocratic governance with greater public participation, Sadowski holds up the reflexive mirror, and argues that public engagement is itself a technocratic procedural fix. In an instance of recursive reflexivity, he would re-focus research and practice on engaging technocratic contexts and practices as necessary for supporting democratic governance of technology. As he states, there is

a drastic need for research and practice directed not at the citizen side, but at understanding and confronting the politics and power of contemporary technocrats. (Sadowski 2020)

Sadowski upholds the RI emphasis on collaborative integration but calls for it to develop an explicit account of technocratic dispositions within the technical practices it would seek to engage.

The reflexive mirror takes another turn in the work of Eric Kennedy in his examination of new predictive technologies in wildfire management. While acknowledging the important role of technological innovation in mitigating risk, Kennedy demonstrates the ways in which the same technologies that enable more precision can also simultaneously conceal the role of assumptions and values in leveraging such technologies to aid decision-making. To refocus deliberation on such ethical and logistical decisions, Kennedy suggests that engagement is necessary; however, in this context, it may or may not be ‘public engagement.’ While some questions might benefit from public deliberation by affected communities, Kennedy much like Sadowski notes that ‘some of these deliberations should likely be focused within the expert community, such as debates about how aggressively or risk-adversely we ought to fight fires.’ Where Sadowski sees a link between expert engagement and aspirations for democratic governance, however, Kennedy implies that such engagement might fall short of those aspirations even if it serves to foster reflexive deliberation within expert communities.

While Sadowski and Kennedy call for reflexive deliberation in expert communities, Matthias Wienroth reflects on the social dimensions of innovation in terms of broader stakeholder communities, and asks how inclusion can be made meaningful in the context of deliberative democracy. His perspective is focused on innovation practices and utilizes the case of biometric technologies in policing and legal contexts. Wienroth offers three practice-oriented values that are complementary to the inclusion dimension present in many RI frameworks: reliability, utility, and legitimacy (RULE). Wienroth considers what happens ‘on the ground’ in the context of inclusion and reflects on how to organize debates with different groups of stakeholders who might be talking past each other. RULE provides concrete values to clarify what is being debated ideally so as to make inclusion matter.

Continuing the theme of recursive reflexivity, Damien Patrick Williams turns the mirror of RI back upon itself, and asks the challenging question of whether some things should simply not be innovated, ‘at all.’ Using the case study of facial recognition and antiblack surveillance, Williams argues that technologies like facial recognition, biometric technologies, and predictive policing are inherently unjust because they are ‘predicated on myriad human prejudicial biases and assumptions which must be named and interrogated prior to any innovation.’ Williams traces the history of policing and marginalized communities, and examines the threads of violence, harm, and subjugation of these communities over time. He argues that the new technologies of policing are ‘thoroughly rooted in systems of oppression.’ In the case of policing technologies and antiblack surveillance, Williams argues that RI must be done in a radically different way and, as others have concluded (De Hoop, Pols, and Romijn 2016), points out that one of the options is that an innovation might need to be abandoned.

Rebecca Monteleone’s perspective is a reflection on inclusion and RI that also serves as a pedagogical primer on integrating disability theory and perspectives into RI research. While her focus is on inclusion in the medical and health care arena, the questions she poses speak to issues of access and inclusion more broadly. She asks, who is really being included? How are conceptions of public good and progress challenged when it comes to thinking about disabled bodies? She emphasizes the importance of reflexivity around inclusion and of thinking about who responsible innovation is for. A key element of her piece focuses on ‘dismantling passive patient roles’ (compare Dam Nielsen and Boenink 2020) and instead fostering meaningful engagement that recognizes histories of exclusion and discrimination, and in doing so, creating spaces in which disability perspectives are epistemically valued.

Finally, Tomblin and Mogul reflect on how to set up pedagogy in a responsible and inclusive way. They apply the AIRR framework within their pedagogy, but also, reflexively, to themselves. Tomblin and Mogul use the AIRR framework to ‘infuse democratic principles into undergraduate education.’ Their STS Postures concept is a ‘body-based understanding of knowledge production, calling into question our traditional mind-based approach of knowing and reflecting on science and technology’ – this approach enables a ‘critical examination of power asymmetries and critiques of toxic cultural norms in STEM, such as technical narrowness and societal disengagement.’ The STS Postures approach embodies humility, openness, criticality, and action, which enables the ability to not only critique, but to identify places of intervention. Coupled with their STS Thinker Skills approach, which invokes familiar dimensions associated with RI, students are empowered to ‘identify relationships among stakeholders, artifacts, and social activities … related to the development, implementation, and use of science and technology within a system.’ After students employ these RI habits of mind, they become comfortable to act and engage in a meaningful way, such as holding a public deliberation about a socio-technical issue.

Engaging asymmetries in an age of crisis and social change

We live in an age of immense destabilization. From a global pandemic to extreme political polarization, anti-science populism, anti-black racism, intensifying climate change and economic crises, now more than ever asymmetries are being rendered visible. Questions of who lives and who dies, whose vote counts, and whose lives matter are more evidently at the center of our current socio-technical ecosystem – and at the center of many of the pieces in this issue. Engaging in deep reflection on asymmetries via recursive reflexivity may seem like an academic luxury, but we believe it can be a vital resource. Such asymmetries are deeply entrenched, as many of the contributors to this special issue reveal. For example, Williams highlights the deep injustices and power asymmetries around policing and incarceration of black people that have existed for centuries – and the ways in which those asymmetries are becoming reified in anti-black surveillance technologies. Monteleone’s piece also speaks to a less visible but no less important crisis in which disabled individuals are rendered passive, rather than active, agents of their own health and wellbeing. Macnaghten and Guivant as well as Bhadra Haines analyze important dimensions of asymmetries as they relate to multiple political cultures. Meanwhile, as Monteiro, Shelley-Egan, and Dratwa 2017 fortend, with every new remedy to one crisis or another, new asymmetries between nation states, between the rulers and the ruled, between the powerful and the powerless are in danger of emerging out of emergencies.

While the contributors to this special issue are far from agreeing with one another on what level of intervention is needed within the contested contexts they study – Monteleone (2020) focuses on stakeholder engagement, Bhadra Haines (2020) on the politics of the nation state, Thorpe (2020) on global capitalism – each is arguably motivated to address problems of inclusion through more critically reflexive theories and practices of engagement. And while who RI and STS engages also varies across the case studies touched upon in the articles – publics (Macnaghten and Guivant 2020), experts (Kennedy 2020), political elites (Sadowski 2020) – the contributors to this special issue resoundingly agree that one actor cannot be forgotten or overlooked: as Williams (2020) powerfully exemplifies, we as researchers, as citizens, as historically bound actors must continue to critically question scientific practices, technological innovations, and economic predispositions – our own as well as those culturally produced more broadly – so as to interrogate, construct, reconstruct, and as needed to relinquish the value propositions they would seek to embed and reproduce.

Recursive reflexivity goes beyond critique from nowhere and instead seeks to inform our own practices as engaged scholars – practices that in the case of Responsible Innovation and its cognate neighbors such as STS making and doing are meant to reach beyond ourselves into contested spaces without forgetting why we set out to do so in the first place. The lessons gleaned from over a decade of public engagement theory and practice together point to the importance of keeping asymmetries of all sorts in mind, even as we aim to redress them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Shannon N. Conley earned a PhD in Political Science from Arizona State University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University and Co-Director of the STS Futures Lab. Her research focuses on responsible innovation, ethics, and the governance of new and emerging technologies in the context of reproductive technologies. She also conducts research around expertise acquisition and is a member of the Studies of Experience and Expertise (SEE) community. She has particular interest in developing a scholarly community focused on STS as a critical pedagogy.

Emily York is an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the STS Futures Lab in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University. Her work focuses on the socio-political and ethical dimensions of high-tech innovation, interdisciplinarity and expertise, STS pedagogy, and knowledge production at the intersection of research, teaching, and public engagement. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication and Science Studies from the University of California-San Diego. She is an Associate Editor for Engineering Studies and Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.