In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo\ud state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop\ud on ‘Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial\ud Technologies’. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from\ud the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible\ud innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important\ud tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the\ud workshop

This article explores how scientists communicate with each other in interdisciplinary collaborative work. It is based on ethnographic research conducted with one such group, which is building a predictive computer model of heat transfer in prostate tissues. The analysis identifies strategies scientists use in their communication practices, including managing different understandings of the validity of knowledge, partial understandings among participants, and interpretive discipline crossing in group meetings. The ideas of productive misunderstandings and of registration as correlating distinct knowledge domains are used to interpret how scientists must manage their unshared backgrounds as part of the collaborative scientific work.

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has affirmed the value of ‘inclusion’ and ‘responsiveness’ as institutional virtues necessary to ensure that reflexivity towards the social priorities behind innovation processes is made possible. It is argued that this affirmation links RRI to knowledge politics in other domains (e.g. environmental justice and the politics of development). It is suggested that lessons regarding inclusion and responsiveness can be drawn from these domains, focusing on the ways in which marginalised perspectives on need and vulnerability, once articulated, can help reconstitute the public sphere in which social priorities are defined. Three case studies are used to explore how entanglements of needs, vulnerabilities, identity and agency are vital to understanding the impacts of innovation and change more generally. It is argued that social science methodologies sensitised to such entanglements are necessary to help constitute a space of inclusion and responsiveness characterised, not by assumptions about idealised rational forms of deliberation, but by styles of communication that recognise vulnerability.

This article examines how geopolitics are embedded into the efforts of Southern nations that try to build new climate knowledge infrastructures. It achieves this through an analysis of the composition of the international climate modelling basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), viewed from the perspective of the Brazilian Earth System Model (BESM) - the scientific project which placed a Latin American country for the first time inside the global modelling bases of the IPCC. The paper argues that beyond the idea of “infrastructural globalism”, a historical process of global scientific cooperation led by developed countries, we also need to understand the “infrastructural geopolitics” of climate models. This concept seeks to describe the actions of developing countries towards minimizing the imbalance of global climate scientific production, and how these countries participate in global climate governance and politics. The analysis of the construction of BESM suggests that national investments in global climate modelling were aimed at attaining scientific sovereignty, which is closely related to a notion of political sovereignty of the nation-state within the international regime of climate change.

This article presents initial results from the Brazilian team in the Responsible Research and Innovation in Practice (RRI-Practice) collaboration, concurrently running in 22 countries. The project invites reflection from institutional actors through a variety of participatory exercises that focus on RRI’s potential for ‘opening up’ and impacting national science and innovation policy. After summarising the operational challenges faced during the research process, we focus on the main empirical findings. We conclude that despite its potential for opening up policy deliberation, RRI faces the inherent hurdles of surpassing longstanding Brazilian institutional traditions of hierarchical governance, autonomy and the dominance of linear models of innovation.