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Paper short abstract:

This talk investigates the ontology of hope with particular attention to its manifestation as a phenomenon in the study sociotechnical practices. What characteristics might delineate hope as a unitary phenomenon while accommodating its diverse expression across and within sites and groups?

Paper long abstract:

This talk investigates the ontology of hope with particular attention to its manifestation as a phenomenon in the study sociotechnical practices. What characteristics might delineate hope as a unitary phenomenon while accommodating its diverse expression across and within sites and groups?

I ground this inquiry with STS literature and my original research covering sites and activities including military planning and technology, robotic science competitions, pure mathematics, and consumer technology. Common to these sites is an orientation towards the future, core counterfactual beliefs, and narratives and identities productive of agency.

I propose that hope can be understood as a plan that realizes agency, the counterfactual possibility of action, in the present moment. Doing so allows application of the social ontology of plans Barry Smith has devised, building upon the work of John Searle and Scott Shapiro. Plans in Smith's account are informational entities that specify action, are modular, and can be enmeshed. They are critical to achieving what Shapiro has called massive social agency. Smith and Shapiro's work was devised to explain military doctrine and the law, respectively. I conclude with modifications and further specifications for the ontology of plans suggested by sociotechnical practices of hope.

Ultimately, this account offers a theoretical lens for STS scholars to better identify and engage with the phenomenon of hope in their work. Understanding hopes of various kinds, from techno-optimism to the "horizontal" hope that Ratto and Jackson (2023) extoll, in similar theoretical terms enables more effective and empathetic engagement and intervention within these practices.

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This paper explores the ecological and ontological impacts of infrastructural electronic waste from decommissioning old mobile networks against the backdrop of sustainable progress promises and efficiency goals of emerging technologies like 6G. How to deal with e-waste in a post-optimistic future?

Paper long abstract:

Despite the logic of growth and progress is materialized on the infrastructures themselves (Pansera, Lloveras, Durant, 2024: 1) and is also embedded on promises of access to a myriad of more advanced services and on public discourses of efficiency that justify escalation towards new, more powerful, mobile network generations, this paper analyses the ecological consequences of growth with respect to the generation of infrastructural electronic waste derived from the substitution and dismantling of old mobile network generations (Bollmer, 2018), especially now that 3G is starting to be decommissioned. While the reduction of energy consumption of the network in operation is an objective at the forefront of technological advancement and also a core mobilizer of the optimistic imaginaries and narratives of future, especially for 6G, other material implications such as infrastructural waste remain less visible (Cano, March, 2022; WEEEForum, 2020). Nevertheless, the materialization of such promissory sociotechnical deployment cracks this rhetorical layer of efficiency and sustainability when it is confronted with the infrastructural e-waste derived from the dismantling of previous generations. Starting from a discourse analysis of the public narratives that fuel 5G and 6G, we will put it in dialogue and add to a broader analysis of other forces (in the shape of economic, political, technological elements and conditions, etc.) that compete and resist for the ontological distinction between (still functional) technological infrastructure or (already) waste. Which specific practices, conditions and circumstances can give us infrastructural hope to live and deal with e-waste in a near post-optimistic future?

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This talk examines how former migrant laborers navigate their afterlives of migration with debilitated bodies. It argues that, beyond access to biotechnologies, it requires equitable social security for people to sustain hope for life when suffering from critical illness.

Paper long abstract:

This talk presents an ethnographic account that interrogates how life-sustaining biotechnology intersects with social inequalities. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research in the hemodialysis ward of a county public hospital in southwest China, this study focuses on a group of young and middle-aged former migrant laborers struggling with kidney failure. From the biomedical perspective, patients suffering from kidney failure can live a long, normal life on dialysis. However, for young and middle-aged physical laborers, they understand such a biomedical imaginary of hope as a privilege for rich people, despite that they have state-sponsored access to dialysis. For them, living a life on dialysis is a state of hopelessness, as it deprives their work abilities, disrupts their social relations, and shatters their life aspirations. This study finds that former migrant laborers do not put hope on life-sustaining biotechnologies to live a life as long as possible. Instead, they often reject treatments and materialize alternative visions for the future at the expense of longer lives. The development of life-sustaining technologies have turned many terminal diseases into chronic conditions. However, the hope that biotechnologies can offer is unevenly distributed to people of different socio-economic status. Through examining how former migrant laborers navigate their afterlives of migration with debilitated bodies, this study argues that, beyond access to biotechnologies, it requires equitable social security for people to sustain hope for life when suffering from critical illness.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes that, besides goal-setting, responding to urgent, societal challenges involves accepting the grim situation one is in, and responding to that situation in real time, with what resources are available. I dub this approach starting from hopelessness.

Paper long abstract:

Faced with a climate catastrophe and associated health, migration and food and energy security crises, international governance has sought to coordinate action through initiatives like the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the specification of Grand Challenges for research. But is goal-setting the only, or even the best, way to respond to crisis? This presentation explores a sideways approach: it proposes that perhaps responding to urgent, societal challenges involves accepting what grim situation one is in, and -instead of building strategy to respond to that situation in some future time- exploring what is doable now, in real time, with what resources are available.

I dub this approach starting from hopelessness. I first introduce work on Taoist and Buddhist thinking which proposes resigning oneself to the actual, versus striving towards the envisioned, as an approach to action. I then define hopelessness as a. having a desire for an outcome, b. holding a belief that this outcome is possible, and c. accepting the situation one is in. I propose that starting from hopelessness may allow opportunities and relations to emerge as conducive to goal-achievement that goal-achievement plans may instead block.

The talk illustrates this approach through examples from real-life crisis responses in Orissa and Wayanad, India. It further connects starting from hopelessness with ‘staying with the trouble’, with ‘contingency approaches’ in the field of Planning, and with improvisational practices rooted in the arts.

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In this research, hope and related themes are explored through an ongoing qualitative study of breakdown and repair in the public health care sector of the Gaza Strip.

Paper long abstract:

Recent work in STS has focused on hope (ordinary and/or fundamental), its connection to sociotechnical worlds, and related concepts of care, repair, maintenance, breakdown, frailty, and discard. In this research, hope and related themes are explored through an ongoing qualitative study of breakdown and repair in the public health care sector of the Gaza Strip. At the center of this study is a small team of ten people, split between Gaza and Canada, that had embarked in March 2023 on a collaboration to inventory, assess, and triage the repair of medical equipment in Gaza’s hospitals and clinics, and localize capacity for producing and installing 3D printed replacement parts for broken equipment. In the intervening months, conflict has destroyed most of the (already damaged) medical equipment and infrastructure, and the aims of the original collaboration and study are completely upended. But the team perseveres. Is it hope that breathes life into this work, or something else?

Using data generated from in-depth qualitative interviews, observations, and diaries and voice-notes, as well as transdisciplinary insights drawn from academic, artistic, and activist sources, this research reflects an exploration of the theme of hope. Where is hope found (if it is found) amidst crisis and despair? How does hope persist in a universe of lack? Does the concept of hope possess an animating energy and explanatory capacity here or, in tracing some of its contours and limits, will we find an opportunity for conceptual (re)engineering?

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Paper short abstract:

We reflect on the learning from ‘Against Digital Fatalism’, a critical digital literacy initiative linking STS with art to address emerging technology’s social and ethical issues. The project blends creativity and critique to envision grounded, just, and hopeful futures with immersive technologies.

Paper long abstract:

Technology hype has been the object of STS critique at a time of grossly inflated expectations and promises about artificial intelligence, the metaverse and other technological ‘frontiers.' Such critical work has been vital to begin to challenge the soft power hype has in materially shaping the future and creating a downstream sense of inevitability, fatalism, or false hope. In resisting hype, STS scholars are now faced with the world-building imperatives implied in the field’s current turn to making and doing: What kind of practices and narratives could meaningfully supplant hype? How do we transition from just calling out snake oil and bull*hit, to creating more grounded, just and hopeful visions of the future? How can STS work empower diverse audiences to engage in critical thinking about the social, political and ethical aspects of emerging technologies? In our project ‘Against Digital Fatalism,’ we engage with these questions through an experimental and collaborative exchange with artists and creative practitioners. The project materialised in three artworks which touch on specific social and ethical issues linked to extended reality and the metaverse, namely digital escapism and injustice, power and financial speculation in virtual worlds, and hopeful and inclusive engagements with the digital. In this contribution we invite the audience to interact with each of these artworks and join us in a playful and collective exchange about hopeful futures.

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This paper reports on mechanisms of hope operative at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, the world’s largest annual mining convention. It explores proximate, millenarian and ordinary hopes, and how such hopes travel from sites of extraction to sites of planning and calculation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a field report on the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, the world’s largest annual mining convention held each spring in the mineral city of Toronto, home to 75% of the world’s mining companies. It explores the forms and complexities of hope operationalized in such environments, from the proximate to the millenarian to the ordinary, and how these hopes are enacted, circulated, and contested over the course of a four-day mining convention. It also explores the movement(s) of hope, across registers from the technoscientific to the ecological to the political, and the sometimes not-so-seamless webs of hope that emerge. It documents the mechanisms by which hope is made to travel (via images, via numbers, via people) from sites of extraction to sites of planning and calculation, and what hopes get dropped and picked up along the way. Building on long-standing STS precepts and principles, it argues for a richer and more symmetrical treatment of hope in and around technoscientific and wider extractive projects; and the central role of hope at the heart of expert calculation.

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Paper short abstract:

In the global supply chain of brown shrimp, notions of ‘luck’, ‘destiny’ and ‘risk’ inform social imaginaries of the future and produce multiple concepts of ‘hope’. This paper investigates how hope shapes the reproduction and transformation of this supply chain in the face of ecological disaster.

Paper long abstract:

Within the global supply chain of brown shrimp, social and ecological crises converge. In 2022, many actors are involved in developing technoscientific solutions that can make the brown shrimp trade more ‘sustainable’ and just. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands and Morocco, where brown shrimp are fished and peeled respectively, this paper investigates how forms of ‘hope’ are multiple in this supply chain. Notions of ‘luck’, ‘destiny’, and ‘risk’ inform how actors situated differently within this supply chain imagine the future; whereas Dutch fishers mobilize luck to account for uncertainties in everyday life, Moroccan shrimp peelers evoke destiny to construct a narrative about their precarious livelihoods. Corporate managers, in contrast, draw on the concept of risk to capture the unpredictability of the future. These concepts entail distinct understandings of the future, actors’ agency in shaping it; by extension, they give shape to ‘the labour of hope’ (Elliot, 2016) in which actors engage. ‘Hopeful’ attachments to the future inform specific ways in which actors are invested in on-going technological innovation and imbue such practices with an ethical sensibility. However, whilst ‘hope’ is multiple, it is also unevenly distributed. This paper argues that more ethnographic attention is needed to understand how concepts such as ‘luck’, ‘destiny’, and ‘risk’ inform the ways in which hope is materially enacted; such understandings can deepen our understanding of how divergent ‘cosmological’ concepts motivate contemporary technoscientific world-making projects.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on interviews with Syrian refugees, we explore the everyday activities involved in maintaining access to power in energy unstable conditions. We argue that hope as a method provides an alternative mode through we can modestly engage in STS research with marginalized communities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses hope as a method to explore the renewable energy imaginaries and practices of refugees facing enery vulnerabilities in Lebanon. Ratto & Jackson (2023) argue for a definition of hope that attends to the “ordinary, the mundane, and the everyday” activities of sociotechnical maintenance that evince sustained practices of ‘staying with the trouble’. In a clarion call Letter-to-the-editor, Eve Tuck (2009) urges social science researchers away from the kind of “damage-centred research” that is often performed in (and on) vulnerable communities. We argue that hope as a method provides an alternative mode by which we can modestly and productively engage in STS research with marginalized communities. Centring the everyday activities involved in maintaining access to power in energy unstable conditions, we surface the contingent and local workarounds and strategies developed and managed by individuals, communities and organizations. Our work draws on extended interviews with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, mobilizing a thematic analysis that foregrounds everyday maintenance activities and the infrastructural imaginaries they bring in into being. Bringing the lens of hope to bear, we highlight the diversity of hopeful futures imagined by refugees, non-profits, and academics when asked to consider renewable energy futures for Lebanon.