Short Abstract

In contrast with technocentric “default futures” that entrench power structures and inequality, this panel bridges STS, futures studies and decolonial thought to examine social technologies: community-rooted, often low-tech ways of making and doing that support the creation of alternative futures.

Description

Our contemporary world is dominated by technocentric, techno-solutionist narratives that script “default futures” and render them socially performative—shaping imaginaries, collective action, and even policy. Imaginaries theory helps explain this force: sociotechnical imaginaries stabilise what a society deems desirable and doable, while Durand’s anthropological journey shows how recurrent images (conquest, salvation-through-tech, rational control) naturalise those defaults. The result is a narrow idea of progress that amplifies Big Tech’s power; as “business-as-usual” futures, these narratives rarely question, and often reproduce, existing inequalities.

In contrast, our panel invites reflection on futures opened by social technologies—relational, community-rooted ways of making and doing, often “low-tech” and context-responsive. Expanding what counts as “technological,” these practices recompose the symbolic repertoire of the future and act as infrastructures for collective anticipation: they convene publics, surface assumptions, prototype alternatives, and translate vision into shared commitments. By embracing diverse onto-epistemologies and pluriversal thinking, social technologies shift attention from solutionism to situated innovation, enabling communities to negotiate futures rather than receive them.

We particularly encourage submissions that show how imaginaries are enacted or contested in practice and how collective anticipation is organised—through methods, media, or institutions—so that alternative, more just futures can gain performative traction.

From these premises, our panel welcomes two main types of proposals:

those that analyse dominant techno-scientific imaginaries and their performative effects of futures, seeking, from an STS perspective, to further examine the intersections between technology, knowledge, and power;

those that explore new pathways of inquiry into non-technocratic and relational forms of innovation and into “decolonised” visions of the future grounded in relationality and collaboration, beyond dominant Western-centric paradigms.

More in general, the panel invites interdisciplinary dialogue across STS, futures studies, and design research, and opens pathways for imagining resilient futures grounded in reciprocity, autonomy and care.

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