The Ethical Governance of EmergIng Technologies

The EGAIS project (http://www.egais-project.eu/) is a three year, FP7-funded research project aimed at providing analysis and advice for ethics in research in the European Research Area.

As part of this project, a workshop is to be held from January 12th-13th, 2012 In the University of Namur, Belgium. The purpose of the workshop is to present some of the analysis and findings of the research consortium to a varied group of stakeholders in a workshop environment. The intention is to create a dynamic, working session that will involve presentations, questions, discussion and reflection. By the end of the two day session it is hoped that all will emerge with renewed insight into the vexed field of research ethics by means of mutual learning in a constructive but critical environment. The language of the workshop will be English.

The workshop will be comprised of the various sessions below (with notional presentation themes).

• Evolutions of the contextual method
• Evolutions of the experimental method
• Evolutions of the open coordination method
• Ways of human change : from individuals to organizations
• Deep Storytelling : Representing oneself
• From discussion to narration and experiment
• Organizing the cooperation of actors
• Adaptations of procedures to contexts, local/global scaling and tuning
• Neo-institutionalism
• NGO’s in multi-stakeholders’ governance
• Industries in multi-stakeholders’ governance
• Administrations in multi-stakeholders’ governance
• The Internet Governance Forum

These issues are of importance to EGAIS research on governance as such governance involves at least the possibility of changing a set of beliefs and actions among groups of people. In order to understand this phenomenon in a way that does not rely upon – at the extreme – the use of empirical sanctions, we need to examine how the will is formed and constrained by conditions around us – by how we construct and understand the contexts in which we find ourselves. Only by constructing this perspective can we ascertain the idea of possibilities for given individuals and groups. Only by understanding possibility in this indexical way can we begin to think about normative injunctions, i.e. before ethical governance can say what we ought to do, it needs to construe clearly what we can do. ‘Can do’, moreover, is a thick term, taking in physical, technical, social, cultural and other dimensions of possibility.