ABSTRACT
In a workshop on convergence at Edinburgh University in September 2012, the editors of this volume drew attention to recent discourse on ‘converging technologies’ in which these technologies are expected to enable ‘improving human performance’ (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002) and, in epistemic terms, are characterized as ‘enabling technologies and knowledge systems that enable each other in the pursuit of a common goal’ (Nordmann, 2004: 14). They argued that various challenges exist regarding the analysis and governance of these technologies and that some of these are apparently caused by the concepts of convergence themselves. In this sense, any conceptual analysis of convergence can be understood as an element of the discursive governance of technoscience, and the editors have thus invited the contributors to this volume to approach existing interpretations of converging technologies with a view to developing a critical understanding of convergence and its governance. In their view, the host of rather broad research fields that are seen as constituents of converging technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive sciences, abbreviated ‘NBIC’ in discourse on converging technologies) are not well defined and are themselves constituted by a range of different epistemologies. The difficulties encountered when it comes to the analysis and governance of these fields of new and emerging technoscience are deemed by the editors to be elements of what they have called the ‘messiness of convergence’.
