Science in Society - caring for our futures in turbulent times

The Science Policy Briefing 'Science in Society: Caring for our futures in turbulent times' is the outcome of a broad discussion process funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF), addressing the more recent key-challenges raised by the ever-closer entwinement of technoscientific and societal developments. While addressing these issues is in itsself by no ways new, this report is written at a time of two novel, closely related, challenges. First, science and technology are increasingly governed at multiple sites, by diverse actors and in disparate ways. Second, the sense of austerity and crisis across Europe has important consequences for the governance of science and technology. This all happens at a time when innovation is being promoted more vigorously than ever as a way out of crisis and as a foundation for future prosperity.

The titel of the report captures two core messages. The notion of "turbulent times" points at the fact that the novel challenge lies in the fact that rapid and continuous change always come with turbulences and that  societies thus need to learn how to live with, accompany and govern such sociotechnical change processes. This goes hand in hand with the notion of "caring for our futures". It highlights the need for a stronger process orientation – expressed in the notion of care – when thinking about our engagement with technoscietific and societal change; for stretching our attention to the whole knowledge generation process from education, over lives in research to more concrete innovation processes; for a close consideration of diversity of values to be considered; and for more attention to the direction of innovation and not solely to the speed and frequency in which it occurs.