Location
Argentina
Summary
Since 2016, the team at the Institute for Studies on Science and Technology (UNQ) and RedTISA have promoted a postgraduate training course for officials, technicians and representatives of social organizations to address innovation and technology strategies and policies for inclusive sustainable development.
Technologies are not neutral; they determine spaces and behaviors of actors, condition structures of production, distribution and access to goods and services, generate social and environmental problems as well as contribute to their resolution. Technologies (often beyond the intention of their designers and producers) exercise agency. In favor of some social groups, against other social groups. They are never neutral.
Policies are not neutral either. They also determine spaces and behaviors of actors. They also condition structures of production, distribution and access to goods and services. They also generate social problems and sometimes contribute to their resolution. They are never neutral.
Technologies and policies are similar. In fact, from this perspective, policies are a constitutive part of all technological dimensions and technologies always condition the material basis of policies. All technologies are policies. All policies are technological.
How can we improve technologies and policies? How can we avoid the undesirable effects of technologies and policies? How can we optimize the direction and functioning of technologies and policies? It is possible to find many normative answers to these questions. It is possible to read different theoretical solutions to these problems. But there is a practical, concrete and inexcusable answer: learning from the processes of conception, design, production and implementation of technologies and policies at the local level.
