Interstitial silences in sociotechnical change: The case of genetically modified ‘tearless’ onions

Abstract

Genetically modified (GM) ‘tearless’ onions were developed in a New Zealand laboratory facility in 2007, but efforts to initiate a field test were unsuccessful, and by 2012 the project had been almost completely dismantled. The overall trajectory of this project was influenced by a collaboration between teams of scientists in Japan and New Zealand; commercial pressures in the New Zealand science system; different regulatory processes that must be followed for indoor versus outdoor research; and activists who detected a containment breach in a GM Brassicas field test. The combination of factors that led to the ultimate demise of GM tearless onions also reveals that some aspects of GM research are not subject to debate, but these would be missing from our analysis if we had only focused on what is present in this controversy. Hence, shifting attention to what is absent from controversy reveals ‘interstitial silences’: matters that lie beyond the boundaries of public debate, but are nevertheless part of the overall trajectory of sociotechnical change. An attention to interstitial silences contributes to an emerging literature on the ecologies of participation by complexifying understandings of what is being negotiated in these participatory spaces. Future research in this area should therefore search for interstitial silences, and also explore how understandings of spatial complexity could be used to further reimagine the wider spaces of participation through which trajectories of sociotechnical change are negotiated.