13. Beyond Technoscientific Utopias/Dystopias: False Dichotomies on Images of the Future, Socio-technical Imaginaries, and More-than-human Worlds
Dayna Leann Jeffrey, Department of Science & Technology Studies, York University; Martin Andrés Perez Comisso, SFIS - Arizona State University
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Images of the future inundate our current realities, centering technoscience as a crucial element in these images. This social preoccupation with the future occurs because there are increasing fears and uncertainty about “our loss of control” over what the future may hold: global pandemic, climate emergency, forced migration, surveillance capitalism, political polarization, among others. The technologies that are supposed to improve and manage the unknown, tend to present us with ‘glaring uncertainties,’ making us uneasy, as the more knowledge we have, the more potential risk we see (Brown et al., 2000).
For that reason, current images of the future tend to bring post-human and post-nature perspectives, leaning towards extreme pessimism or fanciful optimism. The dichotomic assumptions and values of hegemonic images of the future constrain and erase the diversity on alternative futures (De la Cadena & Blaise, 2019). In this session we invite projects that interrogate images of the future beyond the spotlight of utopias and/or dystopias. Those tend to reproduce short term technological solutionism, strong modes of technological determinism, and other kinds of socio-technical shortcomings that disrupt our understanding of current cosmological crises.
This panel seeks multilingual contributions to the ongoing conversation around the role of images of the future in STS, in particular projects and practices looking at local, topical, or systemic images. We hope to have contributions to understanding how to situate, nuance, and (de)center “images of the futures”, to produce alternative realities, and to restore more-than-human balances from the unequal, unbalanced, and unfair relations across scales.
Contact:daynaj@yorku.ca, mapc.088@gmail.com Keywords: Socio-technical utopias/dystopias, Images of the future, Imaginaries, Sociology of expectations, More-than-human worlds
