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- Convenors:
-
Lieke Oldenhof
(Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Roy Bendor (Delft University of Technology)
Arwin van Buuren (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Rik Wehrens (Erasmus University)
Maartje Schermer (Erasmus University Rotterdam)
Judith Rietjens (TU Delft)
Noortje Jacobs
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Amid a global care crisis, this panel explores how speculative and design-based methods can re-imagine care towards more just and livable futures. Drawing on ethics, futures thinking, STS and public administration, it invites reflexive, participatory approaches to caring world-making.
Description
Amid an escalating care crisis—marked by overburdened health systems, precarious (informal) labor, and deepening social and ecological inequalities—this panel invites scholars to explore how care can be imagined, designed, and governed to shape more just and livable futures. Drawing on interdisciplinary work at the intersection of ethics, history, futures thinking, speculative design, and public administration, the panel examines how speculative and design-based methods might expand our capacities to collectively envision caring futures across people, institutions, communities, and infrastructures.
Care is understood here not as an abstract moral principle but as embedded socio-material practices in which actors continually tinker with caring relations, values, and infrastructures (Oldenhof et al. 2025; Bates, Imrie & Kullman, 2017). In health and bioethics, recent scholarship emphasizes how care practices are entangled with moral, technological, and institutional complexities, underscoring the need for reflexive and participatory approaches to future-making (Keulartz et al. 2004; Bak et al. 2025; Jacobs 2022). Futures thinking and design perspectives likewise highlight how imaginative experimentation can address the uncertainty and complexity inherent in organizing and governing care, both now and in the future (Van Buuren, Lewis & Peters, 2023; Bendor 2025).
Building on these insights, the panel seeks contributions that use and enrich speculative and design-based methods—such as scenarios, vignettes, prototypes, and participatory futuring—to grapple with value complexity in contexts like health, social care, and urban governance (Oldenhof et al. 2025). Recognizing that imaginaries of care are shaped by inherited histories and present institutions, we ask how creative and reflexive approaches can open alternative trajectories of (health) innovation, policy, and progress that strengthen a caring democracy of shared responsibilities and collective interdependence (Tronto, 2013). We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions exploring speculative and design thinking as tools for caring world-making (Vervoort et al. 2015).