Too Enabling to Fail – Ethics and Practices in the Legitimation of Nanotechnology

Licentiate thesis, 2023

This thesis reads Beck’s Risk Society in the context of nanotechnology and the politicization of failure in the promise of enabling technologies. It aims to investigate how researchers and innovators legitimate nanotechnology in society. Nanosafety research is the empirical focus, with an approach that builds upon the setting of a Nordic research program. Reflections from STS, in terms of empirical ethics, articulate the conjoining of applied ethics and toxicology in the value-laden endpoint of the (nano)safe society. The thesis exposes three research questions, which broadly correspond to three appended papers. The first question asks how does legitimation crisis in the political economy of research and innovation manifest today? The second question asks how do responsibility practices in responsible research and innovation (RRI) contribute to said legitimation? Lastly, the third question asks how nanosafety researchers reflexively practice anticipation in the legitimation of nanomaterials? The findings are three-fold. First, concerns surrounding legitimation and crisis in the political economy of research and innovation are connected to technoscientific capitalism. Another contribution is the proposal for pragmatism in the European RRI policy community that helps to produce wider legitimation. A third contribution, aiming at the applied ethics of technology, emerges through the study of nanosafety researchers reflexively anticipating the future of nanomaterials. Two further studies are outlined. One will study the Swedish NGO ChemSec, interrogating their ability to reduce the use of toxic chemicals and problematic nanomaterials. The second proposes a field study situated in the Lund-centered nanosafety milieu to explore the implementation of safe-and-sustainable-by-design.