26/06/2014
Kjetil Sandvik's talk on science's social responsibility on Lightning Talks:
What is science’s social responsibility? Is it like corporate responsibility an add-on to the main product: we produce knowledge and scientific solutions, but we also care for the environment, for sustainability, for fair-trade and so on? Or doesn’t social responsibility add to science at all. Obviously it does, but maybe not in the same way as csr-strategies. The main purpose for science is to do science. And in doing so science relates to society in various ways. It can be done in close interplay with other societal actors: politicians, NGOs, people in general during for instance a festival like Science in the City in which the science institutions communicate and discuss science with interested citizens. It can be done in relation to strategic plans: solving medical, environmental, socio-political problems for which the state or commercial actors provide funding. But it can also be what may be called science for science’s sake: discovering, creating insights, producing knowledge without a clear societal purpose to it: it may not be useful or applicable right here and now, maybe it will prove totally useless, a total shot in the dark, but maybe it spawns knowledge which can help solving problems and thus creating a base for science in its strategic mode, in its interplay-with-society mode. So science’s social responsibility may utter itself in various ways but I think it is fair to say that it is all about responsibility for taking part in making society move forward in that science address whatever problems there are, whatever conflicts there are, trying to find the deeper meaning of things, and so on which means that science don’t necessarily just solve the problems that kind of spring to you face like curing cancer and stuff like that. It is also about asking deeper questions about the nature of things: how does people relate, how does culture work, how does nature work (from the micro to the macro level) and so on and so forth. So a lot of the responsibility for science in society is not just about asking question but about figuring out what questions can be asked and what is the meaning of the questions that we ask. It is kind of a little like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: you can pose the question about life, the universe and everything and then you get the answer 42 and you realize that you did not understand the question you were asking. And even though this is kind of funny, it has some kind of serious core to it in that part of science responsibility to society is to figure out the meaning of the questions that we want to pose – and furthermore: which questions can be asked. Doing this may not be limited to short-term processes, to strategic considerations or to here-and-now social responsibility issues: science’s social responsibility is not just a responsibility towards today’s society, but also towards the societies which may evolve in the future.
