Dr Chris Groves

I am a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff. With a background in philosophy and sociology, my research interests focus on how people and institutions negotiate and deal with an intrinsically uncertain future – one that is increasingly imagined against the backdrop of global environmental change and accelerating technological innovation. Along with the ethical and political implications of a range of future-oriented discourses and practices (e.g. risk management, precautionary regulation, and building resilience), my work has examined how our ideas about what it means for individuals and whole societies to take responsibility for their futures change alongside technological transformation. From nanotechnology and personalised genetic testing, to the decarbonisation agenda examined by Energy Biographies and now Flexis, the moral aspects of everyday life and of public policy are shifting alongside efforts to plan and remodel the social and natural worlds. These efforts are shaped by images of more efficiently managed, better governed, ‘smarter’ futures in which people increasingly take more responsibility for a whole range of different aspects of their lives. Building links between qualitative social science and normative ethics can help understand both how technologies and values change alongside each other, and what is really at stake in these imagined futures.

My recent monograph Care, Uncertainty and Intergenerational Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and the earlier Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics (Brill, 2007), co-authored with Professor Barbara Adam (Social Science, Cardiff University), examines these themes in depth, along with a variety of other recent publications.