Thomas Völker
Thomas Völker is a MSCA SEAS postdoctoral research fellow in Science and Technology Studies (STS). His research focuses on environmental governance and on attempts of transitioning towards more sustainable aquacultures. More specifically, Völker is interested in the development of novel feeds as a case of implementing circular economy policies and introducing principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) in Norway.
From 2020-2022, Völker was one of University of Bergen's representatives in the secretariat for the UNESCO Global Independent Expert Group on Universities and the 2030 Agenda (EGU2030).
Initially trained as a sociologist, in his PhD thesis Völker studied “futuring” practices in transdisciplinary sustainability research from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective. After finishing his PhD at the University of Vienna, he joined the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), where he further developed his research interests towards questions about participatory decision-making at the multiple interfaces between science, policy and society. Völker has been working both in academia and policy with his research focusing on practices of knowledge production and circulation in environmental governance as well as on collective experiments with participatory democracy in policy making.
From 2020-2022, Völker was one of University of Bergen's representatives in the secretariat for the UNESCO Global Independent Expert Group on Universities and the 2030 Agenda (EGU2030).
Initially trained as a sociologist, in his PhD thesis Völker studied “futuring” practices in transdisciplinary sustainability research from a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective. After finishing his PhD at the University of Vienna, he joined the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), where he further developed his research interests towards questions about participatory decision-making at the multiple interfaces between science, policy and society. Völker has been working both in academia and policy with his research focusing on practices of knowledge production and circulation in environmental governance as well as on collective experiments with participatory democracy in policy making.
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Papers by Thomas Völker
Science and Technology Studies (STS) has devoted considerable attention to the study of the future. Collectively held imaginations about the future are explored as instrumental in the stabilization of societal and scientific orderings, dynamics of promise and expectation are studied in order to understand processes of technoscientific innovation and the making of particular futures, and varying anticipatory techniques are developed, compared and refined in an effort to delineate new modes of governing in increasingly complex, uncertain worlds. While these approaches of studying the future differ considerably in their empirical focus, they usually have one thing in common: they deal with particular futures, e.g. the future of nuclear energy, the future potentials of nanotechnology and so on, while paying considerably less attention to questions concerning how the future as a temporal concept is constituted.
In this talk we attempt to remedy this omission by bringing together insights from both STS and narratological research to ask how futures are narrated. This means exploring the future as a ‘narrated temporality’ and thus focusing on how stories about the future are constructed, related and ordered temporally. We will provide an empirically grounded understanding of what ‘future’ means in policy contexts – both for policymakers and advisory institutions. We argue that what is understood as ‘the future’ varies significantly in different fields, and that these variations have epistemic, social and moral implications for how we choose to engage with the future, including ideas about what are legitimate issues to be tackled, how to produce knowledge to deal with them, and who is supposed to take action and thus can be held responsible. This means asking how particular stories of the future are co-constitutive of political spaces. Narrating the future then becomes an intrinsically political and ontological activity of negotiating and ordering the present or, to put it differently, a practise of world-making. We argue that thinking about futures as narrated temporalities is a promising avenue to better understand processes of politicization.
Using a comparative approach, we show how different stories about the future relate to different conceptualizations of the political (participation, representation, responsibility, …). To this end we analyse (science) policy documents from the fields of sustainability research, big data and climate engineering.