The Soba Restaurant and the Oyster Bar: Peripheral Spaces for Responsible Research and Innovation

As STS researchers working closely with scientists and engineers, we have been invited into, created, reluctantly entered, and stumbled upon many kinds of spaces, some of which might be considered spaces for responsible research and innovation. Here we discuss a selection of these spaces, drawing on our work in synthetic biology in the UK and molecular robotics in Japan. They include a multidisciplinary workshop, a public engagement event, an art performance, and several panels at scientific conferences on the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by our fields of study. Many of the spaces were owned and controlled by scientists and engineers, and our participation in them was constrained by pre-existing frames. But even in those spaces we designed ourselves it was difficult to challenge institutionalized practices and dominant understandings of the relationship between the natural and social sciences. We often found that the spaces that were most conducive to provocative, productive and critical cross-disciplinary dialogue were at the peripheries of formal events. We therefore explore the importance of peripheral spaces for RRI, drawing on the examples of interactions that took place at a soba restaurant and an oyster bar.