Call for Papers: Constitutionalism in digital and environmental transformation

Since the turn of the new millennium, STS scholars presciently pointed to the constitutional dimensions of science and technology, observing how tacit transformation to constitutional orders are enacted around emergent technoscientific developments (Jasanoff 2003; Callon et al. 2009; Jasanoff 2011; Hurlbut et al 2020). Twenty years later, societies around the world are said to be at the threshold of unprecedented digital and environmental transformation. Numerous initiatives by scientists and technologists, civil society, and governments to respond to and shape the perceived twin transformations make the relevance of tacit constitutionalism increasingly apparent. At the same time, societies' commitments to constitutions and processes of constitution-making today are frequently challenged by the emergency actions authorized in the revolutionary framing of the present.

The Constitutionalism in digital and environmental transformation workshop invites scholars to investigate the forms of tacit constitutionalism in contemporary projects of digital and environmental transformation and the significance of this for just and democratic societies. Participants will work together on an edited volume to bring empirical insights into processes of digital and environmental transformation underway, contribute to the development of theory for the analysis of science, technology and democracy (in particular, the STS framework of constitutionalism), and articulate the significance of the commitment to constitutionalism in the context of the contemporary world.

Twin transformation

Digital and environmental transformations track one another and seem to share many similarities. Human artifice, knowledge, and hubris are said to be the driver of both. Whether rogue machines or out-of-control weather patterns, both appear larger-than-life—threatening to escape human designs. The digital and environmental also play off of and help configure one another. In the face of environmental transformation, the digital is frequently seen as a necessary tool for new forms of global governance. Meanwhile, the development of digital technologies is fueled by and supportive of what many consider to be unsustainable growth under global capitalism, and therefore a leading contributor to environmental degradation.

Rewriting the rules of modern life

The push and pull of the two transformations occurring together set an urgent mandate for reordering the basic premises of societies. Political, academic, and corporate leaders point to change already underway, such as the ineluctable rise of AI or in CO2 levels that, if left unattended, will lead societies "off the charts" of livability. The discourse of transformation or crisis marks something imminent or already here that mandates an urgent response. Transformation-speak also implies an explicitly chosen strategy or commitment to transform. Whether societies are cast as subject to or at the helm of these transformations, the discourse of transformation and crisis introduces the imperative to restructure the expectations and obligations of modern life. Normative, epistemic, and ontological commitments go up for revision. The rules of modern life are implicitly and explicitly rewritten as certain categories—such as biodiversity, circular economy, digital rights, transparency, human-machine alignment—become necessary for thinking about and intervening in the world.

These constitutional reworkings are playing out not only in the work of traditional government institutions, and in historically-important spaces of public deliberation such as newspapers and cafés, but also in new and emerging practices of daily life in the digital age. Basic commitments to social order in the 21st century are being worked out by workers in technology corporations, individuals documenting violence in photographs and videos shared on-line, environmental activists in the streets and on social media. These activities help to redefine the meaning and experience of citizenship, human rights, and balance of power, authoring new constitutional arrangements for collective life in existing polities as well as new ones. In efforts to reclaim or generate new forms of agency and authority, these activities are also frequently in explicit opposition to traditional institutions, which are presented as broken or problematic.

Thinking about digital and environmental transformation with STS constitutionalism

This contemporary situation calls for active investigation of constitutionalism in the context of digital and environmental transformation. This workshop gathers scholars working with the STS constitutionalism framework to examine how new basic orderings of societies are being authored today in light of the twin digital and environmental transformation. We are interested in perspectives on who is doing this authoring and how. For example, considering how tacit constitutionalism is pursued by humans and machines together, with learned digital and environmental values and vocabularies, at the same time in natural languages and in code, with/ through/against material, social and political infrastructures, as part of activities of technological design, evidence making, contestation around facts, or protests on city streets.

The conference will develop this inquiry into the legal-normative, ontological, and epistemic components of constitutions by examining the encoding of rules in contexts of digital and environmental transformation (legal-normative) and re-ordering forms of life (ontological) take place with and against knowledge made for transformation. The conference explicitly takes up normative and institutional knowledge, alongside knowledge from the natural sciences and forms of reasoning promoted by the epistemologies of engineering and attendant decision-making processes. This symmetrical and co-productionist attention to knowledge is necessary as we seek to contend with how digital and environmental transformation is both the means and condition of constitutional response, as well as to understand what kind of knowledge constitutionalism itself authors.

In the area of encoding, we invite scholars who use the constitutionalism framework to look at how initiatives of ethics and governance of digital and environmental transformation, from small-scale initiatives to national and international agreements, are generating new social compacts for the 21st century. What aspects of social order, in particular citizenship, rights, power relations, and institutional responsibilities, are contested or stabilized as societies respond to or enact digital and environmental transformation?

In the area of re-ordering, we invite scholarship into how digital and environmental initiatives support the making of what kinds of constitutional devices and processes. The distributed nature of contemporary political life called for by digital and environmental transformation could be seen as a condition of its resilience. This view, however, must contend with how the very legitimacy of constitutions is increasingly challenged. The challenge comes from deliberate attacks against the foundational rules of political engagement (voting processes, democratic elections, expert advice). It also comes from a more diffuse but pernicious anti-authoritative culture (identity politics, cancel culture, misinformation) that sees hierarchies and rules as impositions to the individual's freedom to claim their certitudes for themselves. Another contributing force is the sense that traditional constitutions have failed societies and contributed to marginalization of some populations and structural injustice. These developments are intertwined with how sociality and public reason transpire in digitally mediated societies facing environmental crises. How do we conceptualize distributed forms of agency in light of existing and retrograde power structures? How are commitments to constitutions and constitutionalism shifting in contexts of digital and environmental transformation?

Significance of a commitment to constitutionalism today

In addition to looking empirically at the tacit constitutionalism, conference participants will also examine our commitment to constitutionalism as STS scholars. What does working on constitutionalism help STS scholars to sharpen about co-production? What is the normative and political significance of working on constitutions and constitutionalism today? The commitment to constitutionalism means a commitment to collective deliberation and agreement about the foundational rights and responsibilities according to which a people decide to order their shared lives. In many ways, this commitment overlaps with calls for deliberative democracy, substantive justice and necessity for inclusion and democratic participation that STS scholars and other critical social theorists have called for for decades. How can this commitment be realized in practice in the urgent atmosphere of transformation that comes in the course of a historical development of digital and environmental consciousness? As part of the conference, participants will work together to produce a co-authored consensus paper on the commitment to constitutionalism in the face of digital and environmental transformation.