“Systems are broken – and so are their stories” – REPAIR Scholarly Talk with Associate Professor Alison Powell on 29.1.

On Wednesday January 29th, we had the pleasure of hosting our first REPAIR Scholarly Talk of the year, featuring Associate Professor Alison Powell from the London School of Economics and Political Science. The event also featured discussions led by Yana Boeva from the University of Stuttgart and Santeri Räisänen from the University of Helsinki.

Minna Ruckenstein & Alison Powell.

In her talk, "Repairing Systems and Stories: Reflexivity and Reciprocity in Social Imaginaries of Technology", Powell explored how dominant technological narratives shape infrastructure development. She highlighted the role of reflexivity and reciprocity in repairing both systems and stories. Through combining STS perspectives with concepts from literature studies, Powell brought to attention how important culture, narrative and imagination are in the context of technology development: What are the different roles in stories about technology? Should we think about alternatives to current stories?

"The current narratives about AI and automation, such as ‘automation will bring efficiency’ or ‘automation will free people from boring work’, tend to repeat within cycles of innovation over time,” Powell stated. “Stories about automation focus on the threat of replacement of human capability. They can be consistent even when told from divergent positions, collapsing the space for developing alternatives.”

Powell also called on people to pay attention to the societal level narratives and practices that we undertake in relation to these stories.

“Current stories of technology are very often focused on narratives of great growth, or else of efficiency and reduction or complexity or context. But these are culturally very anomalous stories, with mastery and dominance considered unproblematic,” Powell explains.

Echoing a recent article by REPAIR PI Minna Ruckenstein, according to Powell, repairing current narratives would require more breathing space for reciprocity: “In repairing systems and stories, we might want to think about developing individual and collective capabilities, consider what's considered valuable, and how and in which ways automating a process might remove value, shift value, or shape values.”

The event also featured prepared commentaries by Santeri Räisänen from the University of Helsinki and Yana Boeva from the University of Stuttgart.

“Who gets to make their fictions into materialities and how can we expand that group of people and communities? And secondly, what can we do with this form of the techno narrative? Can we take it to other genres and other chronotopes? Can we tell that story in a different structure and would that open us up to new ways of imagining technological futures?” prompts Räisänen.

In her comment, Boeva presented her views on these narratives. 

“Social sciences need to reclaim the turf, the terrain of future studies. And by that we do not talk about future making, we do not talk about speculating about the future. It’s rather that, the difference that we can make is that we would imagine a future from an understanding of the real present day needs and practices and actors and human beings and their socio-cultural histories, which are deeply engrained in that – rather than think about a potential that just goes in a linear way and progresses exponentially to the top. This would return, I think, societal level narratives and practices into technology,” Boeva proposes.

Alison Powell & Santeri Räisänen.

The REPAIR Scholarly Talks series brings together researchers and experts to explore the role of repair in technology, society, and culture. Our next one will be held on February 11th with professor Daniel Miller.