STIR Cities Engaging Expert Performance of Sociotechnical Imaginaries for the Smart Grid

STIR Cities Engaging Expert Performance of Sociotechnical Imaginaries for the Smart Grid STIR Cities: Engaging Expert Performances of Sociotechnical Imaginaries for the Smart Grid This proposal extends intervention-oriented socio-technical integration research (STIR) from the lab to the city, engaging with diverse technical experts in two cities, and inquiring into how national and municipal sociotechnical imaginaries for the smart grid in the smart city channel and constrain the responsiveness of technical expert practices to public values such as security, sustainability and justice. The smart city discourse is rich with future visions of sustainability and ICT revolutions in which S&T has the Janus-faced capability to liberate and constrain. It provides a bridge between sociotechnical imaginariescollectively imagined forms of social life that are almost always imbued with implicit understandings of what is good or desirable in the social world writ large--and social science engagements aimed at problematizing expert performances of such imaginaries. Critically, imaginaries have performative and causative power that shape agendas, research trajectories, projects and policies. Following this, cities make for interesting sites for comparative analysis in the context of contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries and STIR interventions to foster more broadly responsive styles of technological innovation and governance across diverse sites and levels of expert practice.