Long abstract:

We are STS researchers working in sociodigital futures in a transdisciplinary context, with the combined challenge of working across disciplines and sectors in a field still in the making. We approach these challenges by centring attention and collaborative processes on experience, materiality and affect. We are inspired by the “experiential turn” (Candy, 2017) in futures studies, and theories of critical care as a “selective mode of attention” (Martin et al., 2015) but also as a doing (Puig della Bellacasa, 2016). We think of this combination as instrumental for materialising plurality (Kimbell 2019) and for working with heterogeneity (Vienni-Baptista et al 2022).

Our position is thus not purely analytical but relational, practice-led, and situated at disciplinary borders as we study futures in the making (Candy and Dunagan, 2017). In the context of sociodigital futures, locating our work within an experiential and embodied space is also a way to care critically (Martin et al. 2015) for our disciplinary differences. In this paper, we discuss our care-full, experiential methodologies for doing transdisciplinary sociodigital futures with three examples.

·Thinking/Making/Doing accompany interdisciplinary explorations through design- and arts-based futuring methods.

·Futures speculations transforms the academic exercise of ‘reading’ into cross-sector, practice-led conversations.

·Early-career researcher (ECR) collective convenes a network for building relations of mutual care and reflecting on interdisciplinary identities, disrupting the ‘business as usual’ of ECR trajectories.

By creating a field of possibilities anchored in experience, we hold space for “slowing down care” (Martin et al., 2015) and navigating the ambivalences of interdisciplinarity.