Cassy Juhasz
Participatory Innovation Unveiled: analysing the social lab methodology in the pursuit of poverty and debt alleviation
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University
Supervisors: Dr. Darian Meacham, Dr. Robert Gianni
Background
Completed my BA Arts & Culture (cum laude) and MsC Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology at Maastricht University. For my Master thesis I focused on how digital communication technologies mediate activism through a case study of the Black Lives Matter movement in the Netherlands. Prior to starting my PhD I was a docent at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Maastricht University, primarily teaching technology studies courses and qualitative research methods.
Content
This PhD is part of the ELSA Lab Poverty & Debt, whose focus is to see whether and how AI and data science can be used to alleviate poverty and problematic debt. My research specifically focuses on the use of participatory methods in addressing wicked problems. This PhD asserts that the lack of uptake of responsible innovation is due to the dualism between a) science & technology and society & the social and b) theory and practice. This is because most frameworks for assessing and steering technology come from, what Ladrière calls, the internal problem of science and technology, which sets ethics against the workings of science and technology. If we instead base our framework on the external problem of science and technology, in which new societal situations are created, we open ourselves up to a dynamic, iterative and pragmatic approach. The focus then becomes the positive impact of science and technology, which contributes in four ways: extending the scopes of ethics, creating new ethical problems, suggesting new values and modifying the form in which the question of determining norms arises (Ladrière, 1977).
