Albeit in tiny ways, my work aims to help in struggles to 'democratise progress' towards social equality, distributed power and a flourishing Earth. With footnotes below on links between specific topics and papers - and roles of scientific objectivity and collective endeavour in academic study - here's a summary of my main motivating research questions:

1: Directions for Research and Innovation
Science and technology in any particular area can progress in many contrasting directions. Not all of these can be fully realised together. So how can societies move away from thinking in ‘one-track ways’ (as if ‘the future’ is set and history a race), enabling instead a more inclusive, deliberate, plural and robust (ie: democratic) politics of choice among alternative possible pathways?

2: The Politics of Risk and Uncertainty
Powerful political incentives suppress the true depths and breadths of uncertainty. With science often directly complicit in this, indeterminate unknowns are mistakenly simplified to apparently tractable 'risks'. Policies are thereby misleadingly asserted as if they can be definitively 'evidence based'. How to resist these expedient syndromes and make politics more rigorous and accountable?

3: Science, Technology and Precaution
In facing uncertainty, what are the links between scientific understanding and socially appropriate technology (on the one hand) and ethical responsibility and precaution (on the other)? How can politics minimise expedient manipulations and become more rigorous and accountable about the ways in which science and precaution are not contending but mutually reinforcing?

4: 'Opening Up' Technocratic Politics
In concrete terms, which are the most practical and trustworthy ways under different conditions, to get the best out of technical expertise, whilst learning from different knowledges, engaging diverse perspectives and interests, and valuing public scepticism? How in particular can methods like multicriteria mapping challenge incumbent manipulations and enable greater rigour, inclusion and accountability?

5: Power, Reflexivity and Responsibility
Are current institutions, practices and discourses around research ethics and responsible innovation sufficient to deliver their officially-assigned tasks? Is there more to these debates than meets the eye? How to interpret injunctions and claims around needs for reflexivity? What are the workings of politics and power behind these kinds of debate? What implications arise for democracy?

6: Transdisciplinarity, Participation and Democracy
How exactly does power work, such as to shape and steer science and technology – and wider knowledge and innovation? How to address resulting imperatives for participation by those who are most interested and affected – especially those who are most marginalised? What capabilities are offered by social science towards escaping current patterns of inequality and exclusion?

7: Resilience, Transformation and Diversity
How can society achieve the necessary profound global shifts towards Sustainability – as these relate, for instance to energy, food, health, shelter, connectivity, mobility, materials, security and Nature? What roles can be played by making infrastructures, institutions – and politics more widely – more progressively responsive to positive practical opportunities presented by resilience, transilience, plurality and diversity?

8: Care, Conviviality and Sustainability
Climate and wider Sustainability goals are tending to grow ever more controlling: imagining a new 'Anthropocene' epoch of notional human domination and supposed 'planetary management' (eg: of global temperature). How can crucial social and environmental actions be cultured way from technical ideologies of control and instead towards more convivial values of care?

9. Balancing Against Deep Incumbency
How deep and pervasive in society are the forces resisting progressive change - for example around civil-military nuclear infrastructures? Are these simply a matter for ‘evidence based’ policy and ‘instrument mixes’ directed at particular sectors? Can academic research and policy analysis consider themselves to be separate? What roles are played by scholarly aspirations and claims to independence or objectivity?

10: Modernity, Configuration and Emancipation
What wider implications arise for relations between human communities and their encompassing social, natural and material worlds? What roles are played by long-run cultural formations (like currently-globalising Modernities) apparently beyond the reaches of normal politics? How to change this, and allow knowledge and innovation to become more driven by – and enabling of – emancipatory struggles?

I greatly welcome reactions to any of this work.

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Footnote on particular topics and specific papers

For more detail on how these individual themes relate to specific research outputs, with direct links to full texts of relevant papers, please see the links on the left hand side of my profile page.

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Footnote on objectivity in academic research

For those for whom a research agenda like this raises these kinds of questions, I offer a short discussion both of some general issues and of some particular pressures and dilemmas that I have experienced in work in 'A NOTE ON OBJECTIVITY AND AUTHORITY IN ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP' (link in side panel on the left hand side of my profile page).

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Footnote on relations between individual and collective work

Since all notionally 'individual' work is actually a refraction of collective activity, it is crucial to try to resist atomising and manipulative pressures of academic credit-appropriation. For a highly incomplete but indicative list of many of the teachers, friends and colleagues who helped inspire and co-create the above efforts, please see the link in the side panel titled 'Collaborative Impact Summary'.

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Footnote on the full range of themes and topics implicated in this work

In case it is of any wider interest or use, a rough indication has been built up over the years, of the full constellation of themes of interest in this work. This is offered by the index to the coding tags used in my bibliographic database. Without the underlying detailed topics and notes (which are linked to separately), this can be found via the link on the side panel named 'TagMap - for Mendeley Database'.