Introduction

Throughout this book, we have discussed a range of challenges and possibilities that arise in relation to science and expertise. These include the boundaries between science and democracy, or more generally between science and politics, and how concerned groups or the general public can be involved in technoscientific issues. It is almost impossible to find areas in life that has not been influenced by technoscientific developments. When the results of science inflict on people's lives and when political decisions and public discussions are framed by scientific expertise, fundamental and classical issues concerning democracy emerge: Who is concerned? Who governs? Who benefits? What negative impacts and uncertainties are to be found? Our focus on scientific knowledge and expertise could be assessed as a limitation in our approach to democracy, however we argue that science and technology developments inevitably shape social order and therefore also impinge on how we can imagine and practice democracy. In this final chapter, we present our view on how STS can contribute to an improved understanding of the interplay between science and democracy.

In the introduction to this book, we referred to the shadow theory of democracy, which points to the hidden assumptions and unexplored premises of democratic theory. These hidden premises can also be thought of as vulnerabilities of todays’ liberal democracies concerning questions such as: Who is the public? Who governs? How can we guarantee that democracy leads to equal outcomes? (Gustavsson 2018). These are termed ‘vulnerabilities’ because they are often assumed to be connected to clear answers. But they seldom are, and they can, therefore, lead to mistrust in the democratic system altogether. They can also pave the way for charismatic leaders that give clear answers to these questions, even though these types of answer do not really exist. The public is not easily demarcated, since those who are concerned by decisions cannot always be identified in the population within a nation state. Moreover, those who govern are far from limited to publicly elected politicians, but include a range of individual and organizational decision makers, and they may have to deal with lock-ins that are difficult to change and hence claim control over.

“We both really love data”: Shalev NessAiver's story (interview transcript)

So it was probably around November, I think, when it started to get bad, and I’d been doing a lot of research into just baby health and development [during] the whole pregnancy. You know, we both really love data information and, you know, we’re science-oriented. So when this started happening, I did all the research. I looked around and I read a bunch of papers, and put together a picture. And I was pretty worried because there's quite a lot that could happen.

So I began to see there was a pattern, right? It became fairly clear that if you figured out where the fires were and where the winds were blowing, you could tell when it was going to be really bad. So … in the morning I started doing that and I would just message her or tell her in the morning: “Okay, today, like, you’ve got to be really careful, don't go outside in the middle of the day. Here are the times when it's probably going to be better.” You’d start to see repeating wind patterns where over one period of time when the temperature dipped, it would blow in and then another one would come from a different direction and clear it out. So I was able to kind of give her a little sense of, like, you know, “in these couple of hours, that's when you should go outside. Everything else is probably going to be bad, but we should go shopping right now”.

And then I realized, well, look, there's a lot of people here, and I’m sure other people could benefit from this. So I just – I tried to do the simplest possible thing I could do, which was to provide information … I do a lot of web development, so I just made, like, a little mini webpage, and then took pictures of that. Since I was already doing it for her, I just put it on a Twitter account and started publishing that. As the months rolled on, the wind patterns changed and more fires sprung up. So it was less useful to say, like, “Here's what's going to happen”, because all I could really say is “It's probably going to be smoky all the time”.

Introduction

This is a book about family, based on learning from the narratives of young adults who were in state care in childhood. By thinking through ‘family’ in care experienced lives, we aim to move beyond the pervasive story of the conventional family, building new insights into complex connected lives, identities and practices.

The book is based on two studies, both of which involved care experienced people living in England who were in early adulthood (all of whom were aged 16–30 years at the time of joining the research). These young adults are diverse, but they have in common that they spent time during childhood living apart from their birth parent/s: ‘looked after’ under English law, in court-ordered or voluntary arrangements that included residential care, foster care with unrelated families, kinship care with family or friends, and in some cases, legally permanent arrangements including adoption. As discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, these young adults are part of a diverse population, with varied experience in terms of reasons for entering the care system as well as the timing, nature and duration of their placements. But under English law – the Children Act 1989 – a common purpose for placement is clear: to safeguard or promote the child's welfare. As such, placing a child in care is an intervention that inevitably involves thinking about family.

Yet this is not primarily a book about public care: it is a book about family. There are two reasons for this.

Introduction

The history of the Balkan Peninsula, like that of many other regions of the world, has been marked by violence. The turmoil was caused by the spread of different religions in these areas (for example, the spread of Islam with the Ottoman Empire) and intra-religious schisms (for example, the schism between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in the 11th century). The 20th century brought fundamental political changes to this part of the world that still reverberate today: the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, followed by the Balkan Wars (1912–13), the two world wars and the Yugoslav era (Calic, 1995; Bose, 2002).

The inability to resolve many ‘ethnic issues’ continues to weigh immensely on the people of the area today – including in present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the war that devastated the country between 1992 and 1995 deepened ethnic, religious and national divisions. These divisions, which were relatively mild (or effectively put down) during the Yugoslav era, when BiH was praised a symbol of coexistence, are still present today. This is not surprising given that the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), which effectively ended the armed violence in 1995 – but did not bring reconciliation – set the country's divisions in stone and even legalized them. Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats ‘got’ the Federation of BiH (51 per cent of the territory), while Bosnian Serbs were ‘rewarded’ with the Republika Srpska (RS), covering 49 per cent of the territory (Bougarel, 1996; Carmichael, 2002). By perpetuating at least three different streams of ethno-nationalist rhetoric, underpinned by the portrayal of the ‘other’ as the enemy, the political elites of each nation maintain a firm grip on power in both entities to this day.

Many people living in BiH have personally experienced the war or, if they are members of the younger generations, have strong beliefs about the war based on what they have been told about it or what they have read about it. Moreover, people living in the aftermath of armed violence are ‘reminded’ of the war and current ethnic tensions on a daily basis – which is not surprising given that the DPA established the ‘ethno-political functioning’ of modern BiH.

Introduction

In the first chapters of this book, I argued for the need to recognize the dynamic contingencies and ambivalent complexities of ‘family’ for people with care experience. Continuing that discussion, this chapter considers how the boundaries of family are configured and reconfigured over space and time, drawing on narratives of kinship and family connection that span families of origin and experiences of placement in care. Thinking across these accounts, we see how meanings of ‘family’ may be simultaneously constant and fluid. Mason's (2018) account of affinities sets out the idea of ineffable kinship, which she defines as ‘a something that is in connection, with a charge that feels fixed, immutable and elemental’ (p 59). Some of the narratives detailed in this chapter resonate with that definition and show how understandings of family connections can endure despite conflict and complex disruptions. At the same time, as Mason writes in the epigraph to this chapter, the examples presented here show how understandings of kinship – of ‘who counts’ as family – may also ‘segue and blur in and out of one another’ (Mason, 2018, p 111), shifting over time.

Attention to the complexities of ‘who counts’ as family has both practical and theoretical value. Above all, a nuanced conceptualization of the diversity of family connectedness is necessary for policy and practice efforts to support people in navigating the complexities of their family relationships, both in and after care (see Holmes et al, 2020).

In this chapter, I will address the way platforms have developed in the field of digital gaming and use this historical backdrop for interrogating critically the notion of platforms. The historical development of gaming platforms can help us to question what should indeed be attributed to the platform as a computational system and what should rather be explained by the platform owner's financial status and position within the wider market context. Traditional game consoles are, in practice, proprietary innovation platforms, in Gawer's (2011) and Cusumano's (2010) sense, a set of development and publishing tools and a key contact point to the gaming audience made available to complementors on certain conditions. As developer and publisher, you must contract with the platform owner to get your game title on the console, and as a gamer, you must purchase the console to be able to play your games. In this way, the gaming consoles of the 1980s and 1990s effectively inserted themselves between game publishers and the gaming audience in the same manner as contemporary platforms are said to do, and their specific design and forms of governance indicate a certain market order, that is, a certain field of incumbents and challengers (see Chapter 3). Their power is that of the traditional book publisher owning the key to a particular version of the book format, which happens to be the market standard. These platforms were a key principle in the consumer game market from the 1980s onwards, and the key distinction of the 1990s game market was not drawn between platformized and non-platformized cultural production (Nieborg and Poell, 2018) but rather between proprietary platforms such as PlayStation and open platforms such as the PC. Accordingly, the 2010s market did not mark a new era of platformization but rather the introduction of a new type of platform and a new integration of platforms and markets.

As Aphra Kerr observes, one key trend in the game market during the past decade has been a further concentration of ownership and market domination by an even smaller number of actors, such as Microsoft, Apple, Tencent, and Google (Kerr, 2017).

Staking claim to history

In building a claim to the space of the meadow, activists often called on a history of the site that situated it as a pristine space of leisure. It is important for the way the campaigns have portrayed this land that it was never ‘built’ on before, although the surface of the pitches was artificial and it at one time had two changing room buildings on the site. Only one of those now remains, crumbling on the Clouston Street side of the meadow. The lack of historical building on the land is written on laminated posters on the site itself, as well as on the website. In making claims to ‘history’ and the idea that this is ‘established’, Polly and Alasdair, as well as the posters around the site, make knowledge claims about the site and position it as a local community good: as playing fields, as for ‘leisure use’. In invoking history they are also making claims to precedent and legitimacy, to shift what could be seen as an argument for a change of use, to an argument for continuity of use.

This historical perspective, however, was part of a framing of the site that sat awkwardly against earlier periods of activism. Sean, who was active from the mid-1990s until around 2007, took some umbrage with this pristine vision, noting to me in 2016: “They’re talking as if this site has never been developed, never been put forward for any kind of community scheme whatsoever. … But that's not true.”

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to prepare a concrete roadmap for the EU in its attempts to find strategies for overcoming troubled pasts in European countries in four different domains (history, media, politics, arts and culture). By doing this, the following roadmap attempts to answer what the EU institutions can do to help European countries, both members and aspiring candidates for the membership, to foster the processes that would lead to the overcoming of troubled pasts in respective countries.

But first, a quick overview of the EU integration processes since the end of the Second World War until the present day, explained from the perspective of the ‘peace ideas’ that have been underpinning integration efforts in different times, is needed to understand how the EU developed as an actor that aims at helping the countries to overcome their troubled pasts. If the European Community (EC) was, especially in the first decades after the Second World War, ‘security-oriented’ primarily inwards, the institution gradually evolved into an actor with stabilizing aspirations, which aims at projecting peace outside its borders.

We begin in 2012, with one of the most remarkable events for the EU as a peace actor. This year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU, justifying it with the following formulation: ‘The EU's most important result is the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation, democracy, and human rights. The stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace’ (Birchfield et al, 2017, p 3).

This prize – although widely contested, because the EU has still been lacking effective capabilities to build peace in conflict societies – was a result of decades-long endeavours. The ideational basis of European reconstruction after the Second World War was building such international order, which would reduce or even fully nullify the possibility that the European states would again resort to the use of armed force for ‘resolving’ their disputes. The founding fathers of the European integration believed that this aim could be reached by, first, fostering cooperation among European states, and second, by intertwining them economically to the greatest possible extent.

Justice refers to a broad concern with fairness, equity, equality and respect. Just from the daily news, it is readily apparent how questions of justice or, in fact, the more obvious experiences of injustice shape our everyday lives. From global trade to our own personal consumption; living or dying through war and peace; access to education; relations in the workplace or home; how we experience life through a spectrum of identities; or the more-than-human entanglements that contextualize our environments, we need to conceptualize and analyze the intersections between spaces and practices of justice in order to formulate innovative and grounded interventions.

The Spaces and Practices of Justice book series aims to do so through cutting across scales to explore power, relations and society from the local through to international levels, recognizing that space is fundamental to understanding how (in)justice is relationally produced in, and through, different temporal and geographical contexts. It is also always practised, and a conceptual focus on these ‘doings and sayings’ (Shove, 2014) brings a sense of the everydayness of (in)justice but also allows for analysis of the broader contexts, logics and structures within which such experiences and relations are embedded (Jaeger-Erben and Offenberger, 2014; Herman, 2018).

Introduction

Both science and democracy are based on representation. We have suggested that this means a dividing line is created between those who represent and those who are represented. Concerning science, and expert knowledge more generally, fears are sometimes raised in relation to expert rule. However, this is often an unproblematic, and even a desirable, situation. The desire to hand over certain tasks to experts is especially strong when non-experts have no interest in knowing the details, or would not even be able to learn them, but still need to get things done. This applies to everything from healthcare to plumbing, architecture, and energy production. But sometimes engagement and resistance can be mobilized among citizens because the representation – the delegation to experts – is unsatisfactory. Experts can be wrong and can claim authority on issues that go far beyond their expertise and yet have great influence over the course of events. Citizens can sometimes contribute to better representation since they have other, often more local, experiences than the experts. But above all, citizens, relevant groups, and the general public have an important role to play in judging expertise as credible and relevant, or not.

Participation and its role for democracy is much more complex than a simple dividing line between unquestioned delegation to experts and direct participation of laypeople. It involves parliamentary debate and decision-making, practices of public policy making and administration, issue formation and mobilization in social movements, practices of investigative journalism and media reporting, and so on. This also means that there are potentially many democratic sites at which science and technology issues are communicated, decided on, and practiced (Laurent 2017). It means too that for each issue, we might be able to trace particular ecologies of participation – for instance, particular forms of communication and dialogue, assemblies of concerned groups, types of facilitator for participatory events, and institutionalized ways of managing issues in inclusive or exclusive ways (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016).

This chapter returns to the idea described in Chapter 4 of participation as crucial for good governance, exploring this in more depth and in relation to the idea of co-production. In short, participation is understood as being about co-production of issues and actors. In the next section, we discuss why STS is particularly concerned with the question of participation.

Care, kinship and climate, and their ambivalent terrains (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5) are our focus in this chapter. Feminist technoscience studies scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa attends to the maintenance of care in interdependent worlds. This maintenance, she argues, has ‘ethical and affective implications’. She urges ‘staying with the tensions between these dimensions’ (2017: 5). It is these tensions that animate our analysis. While our initial focus in developing this study was the bushfires, COVID-19 is now woven into all of our lives. The pandemic and bushfire smoke are intertwined in our participants’ accounts. Across 2020, takenfor-granted rituals and relations became impossible, or only possible in very small windows, or with particular people/professionals: COVID restrictions resulted in maternal health nurses parked in cars outside houses interviewing mothers to be about their babies’ health before quickly slipping inside homes to take measurements that weren't possible from a distance. Exploring COVID-19, the smoke and fires together, we see how plans for care and kinship associated with birth and new parenting were, sometimes very hastily, renegotiated – often in ways that participants felt were unsatisfactory, although not always. A few participants pointed to silver linings in the ways in which normative expectations in relations to kinship were necessarily disrupted.

In this chapter we have separated stories about fire from stories about smoke and about COVID-19. While we are thinking about how these crises are interwoven, examining each distinctly helps us see how care is queered by, and resonates through, each event. In 2020, our participants became interdependent in ways that they could not have foreseen, and sometimes this was a source of added tension (for example, when families found themselves negotiating evacuation orders in the midst of fires). During the pandemic, participants sometimes felt robbed of dreams of interdependence that they had carefully cultivated with a pre-pandemic mindset. In interviews, we asked how and when our participants looked for help and who was able to answer that call. Here, we also attend to how they accessed institutional care in times of crisis, and the absences they felt in terms of medical care. Care maps our participants created (some of which are reproduced in Chapter 2) trace the ambivalent terrains of care that surfaced in these intra-actions and entanglements.