School of Social and Political Science

Description

In recent years, applied robotics has become a strategic technological domain expected to contribute to European integration, economic development, and the solution of grand societal and environmental challenges. One area of application that has been strongly supported is robotics for inspection and maintenance of large physical infrastructures. By examining how an emerging policy mix articulates this field of application, this presentation helps to fill a gap between mainstream innovation policy studies and the growing field of maintenance and repair studies. While the former tend to ignore mundane activities of repair and maintenance, the latter have been reluctant to examine how innovation actors, policy, and discourse have turned their gaze on maintenance activities. The presentation introduces a five-dimensional framework that helps to examine co-evolving dynamics between innovation policy and the field of inspection and maintenance robots. The framework dimensions are: highlighting an area of opportunity, crafting a trans-sectoral field, upscaling, contesting the existing strategies, and an underdeveloped repair and maintenance of the innovation infrastructure. Drawing on this framework, the presentation examines the articulation and fragmentation of a number of policy instruments that have guided the development of several European projects on the inspection of water, energy, and transport infrastructures. The conclusions will focus on what repair and maintenance analytical sensitivities contribute to the study and implementation of policy mixes.

Bio:

Dr. Carlos Cuevas Garcia is a postdoctoral researcher at the Innovation, Society and Public Policy Research Group at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich. His research, teaching, and supervision activities focus on the interrelations between the politics of science, technology and innovation and the production of individual and collective identities. He currently leads a section of the EU-Horizon2020 project BoostEuroTeQ (strengthening institutional transformations for responsible engineering education in Europe). Previously he worked on the successfully concluded EU-Horizon2020 project SCALINGS (Scaling up co-creation: Avenues and Limits for Integrating Society in Science and Innovation), mostly exploring co-creation and public engagement practices of the European robotics community.

Carlos studied sociology in Mexico before obtaining an MA in Research Methods and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), sponsored by the Mexican National Council on Science and Technology. His PhD explored discourses around interdisciplinarity and the constitution of interdisciplinary selves and identities.