Paper short abstract

The hosts of the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, Japan boldly proclaimed that visitors would “co-create our future society." At the Expo, both techno-scientific imaginaries and futures generated otherwise were evident. Can Expo be a microcosm of a world where many worlds fit (Escobar, 2017)?

Paper long abstract

The most recent World Expo was held in 2025 in Osaka, Japan. Part fair, part trade show, part museum, World Expos are global mega-events which offer spectacular, multi-sensory, and deeply moving venues for publics to explore futures. The hosts boldly proclaimed visitors would “co-create our future society." In Osaka, 158 countries told their own stories. Rather than offering a universal narrative, the multiplicity of voices at contemporary Expos can help participants envision a world where many worlds fit (Escobar, 2017).

My research contributes to this panel’s inquiries into both techno-scientific imaginaries and futuring otherwise; both were evident at the Expo in Osaka. For 175 years, World Expos have promoted scientific and technological progress. Past Expos promoted universal, imperial visions of the future, but in recent years they have offered a platform for a more diverse set of voices. If “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with,” it also matters who tells stories and how (Haraway, 2016, p. 12). While sociotechnical imaginaries describe national-scale, power-backed stories about futures (Jasanoff & Kim 2015); Keeler and colleagues (2015), Ramos and colleagues (2019), and Ollenburg (2019) share localized, contextual, culturally-specific, and collaborative methods. I will share some of the many experiences of futures at Expo 2025: a subversive art installation (Brazil), evocative color-soaked rooms and rhythms (Spain), vibrant hospitality (Indonesia), mossy dark (Ireland), the hospitable sands of Jordan, plant-centered themes (the Baltics and Poland), critical histories (the Marshall Islands and Malawi), and multi-sensory exhibits (Croatia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Monaco and Colombia).

Paper short abstract

Dundee’s games history reveals a lasting paradox: community-rooted digital creativity repeatedly flourishes alongside extractive labor, external ownership, and precarity. Rather than a linear transition, the city’s trajectory reflects a ch’ixi coexistence of incompatible futures held in tension.

Paper long abstract

Over recent decades, Dundee has become known for its experiments in digital creativity while still carrying with it several legacies of its earlier industrial regimes. Repeatedly, the city has generated collaborative, community-rooted forms of innovation and future-imagining that reshape its economic and cultural trajectory, while remaining embedded in extractive labour regimes, external ownership, and accumulation logics (Bozdog, 2022; Tomlison, 2014). Rather than resolving into a clear sociotechnical developmental path, Dundee’s history is marked by the durable coexistence of autonomy and dependency, creativity and extraction, care and disposability.

We make this paradox evident by analysing two empirical vignettes. First, during the 1980s, when informal collaborative computer clubs flourished, embedded in low-wage electronics manufacturing for multinational firms such as Timex and Michelin. These grassroots practices reimagined and reoriented the city’s future, giving rise to globally successful studios such as DMA Design. Second, currently, a similar configuration persists as developer collectives and care-oriented practices coexist with local incarnations (eg, Rockstar) of a global games industry characterised by crunch culture, speculative investment, and mass layoffs.

Such persistence challenges sociotechnical transition models that assume a directional movement toward a stabilized regime (eg, Geels, 2004; Sovacool & Hess, 2017). To interpret this paradox, the paper mobilises Silvia Cusicanqui’s concept of the ch’ixi, understood as the unresolved coexistence of incompatible logics that remain entangled without synthesis (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018). Read through ch’ixi, Dundee’s video games industry trajectory does not represent a transition toward a purified “alternative future,” but the persistent negotiation of incompatible futures held in tension.

Paper short abstract

My research focuses on industry analysts as Hype’s New Actors, showing how they translate knowledge from different sources into tools and documents while balancing performance incentives, fair views on hyped information, and power dynamics between different actors in the digital economy.

Paper long abstract

In the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence, the concept of hype has attracted increasing scholarly attention. However, within current hype studies there remains limited empirical research that examines the mechanisms and power dynamics through which hype operates in the digital economy, particularly in relation to how hyped narratives generate momentum and shape dominant understandings of future possibilities.

Drawing on the social world/arenas theory and the concept of broker, my research focuses on a particular group of actors in this field: industry analysts, identified by Pollock and Williams (2026) as Hype’s New Actors. It contributes to the sociology of expectations by showing how analysts accumulate knowledge from different sources, occupy a brokerage position within networks, and systematically translate knowledge into tools such as the Hype Cycle. Although such artefacts are not always directly used in everyday practices of generating anticipation, they have become widely recognised devices through which actors think, talk, and act upon hype, helping to stabilise particular way of thinking about technological future.

My research also contributes to hype studies and the literature on industry analysts by examining the power dynamics within analysts’ own professional world, where a balance must be maintained between performance incentives inside analyst firms and the production of fair views on hyped information. Particular attention is given to the power relations between vendors, end users, press and public discourse, and to the methodological work through which analysts collect evidence and shape influential accounts of technological futures.

Key words: industry analysts, hype management, collective narratives

Paper short abstract

The Rhenish mining region is transforming due to the lignite phase-out and climate neutrality goals. A survey compares the acceptance of future scenarios and captures visions on key domains. A qualitative analysis examines sociotechnical imaginaries and visions of the future.

Paper long abstract

The German mining region “Rheinisches Revier” is undergoing significant economic and social transformations. This is driven by Germany's effort to achieve climate neutrality by 2045 through the phase-out of lignite. To this end, political decision-makers are planning numerous changes, thereby creating and stabilising sociotechnical conceptual worlds. These include plans to establish the region as a model for climate-neutral industry, to fill opencast mining areas with water, to significantly expand regional mobility, and to develop hydrogen as a central focus.

In this context, a population survey for the Rhenish region was conducted at the beginning of 2026. The aim was to compare the acceptance results of five possible future scenarios, understand the residents' visions of the future, and examine the acceptance of topics related to structural change.

For imaginaries regarding the future, open-ended questions were used to ask residents about their visions and concerns regarding the future of the region. Specifically, they were asked about the key domains energy, transport, tourism, landscape, society, and the economy. From an STS perspective, these expressed ideas represent empirical articulations of sociotechnical imaginaries. Qualitative content analysis was used to determine the nature of these ideas within society, whether they differ between population groups, and the extent to which political top-down visions converge or diverge with the bottom-up visions of the residents. The analysis also examines the extent to which residents’ visions reproduce dominant techno-solutionist imaginaries or articulate alternative, socially embedded pathways for the regional future.

Paper short abstract

This paper proposes social technologies (SoTech) as a framework for reimagining futures beyond techno-solutionism. Drawing on critical futures studies and decolonial perspectives, it highlights community knowledge, collective agency, and pluriversal pathways for future making.

Paper long abstract

In contexts shaped by colonial legacies, technocentric and techno-solutionist imaginaries of progress remain dominant. These imaginaries promise innovation, automation, and efficiency, often tied to digital technologies and the interests of powerful corporate and geopolitical actors. Despite growing critiques, few frameworks examine alternative futures rooted in care, community knowledge and collective autonomy. In response, this interdisciplinary contribution draws on critical futures studies and design to propose a theoretical framework centred on the notion of “social technologies” (SoTech) – practices, relationships, and systems that integrate lived experiences and embrace the diverse epistemologies and methodologies of communities, particularly those emerging from the Global South. These approaches challenge extractive models of innovation by promoting alternative pathways for technological development based on community dreams, needs, and aspirations. SoTech opens space for culturally grounded, non-hierarchical models of creation, fostering ecosystems in which technology functions as means of solidarity, sustainability, and self-determination rather than as a tool of control or commodification. By examining the intersections of technology, power, and culture through a decolonial lens, this work advances a pluriversal perspective that questions dominant narratives of progress by exposing their underlying assumptions. The implications of this research are threefold: it expands STS studies by integrating decolonial perspectives, opens pathways for interdisciplinary inquiry into community-based solutions, and inspires futuring approaches that center relationality with community- and nature-driven processes. The paper concludes by arguing that integrating social technologies into futures practices can expand how societies imagine and enact alternative futures beyond Western-centric and technocratic paradigms.

Paper short abstract

hrough a multi-sited ethnography, I will contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of a seed commons. This research project explores seeds as sites of epistemic reclamation by local and indigenous communities and as sites of generative dissent (Hernandez Vidal and Moore, 2022).

Paper long abstract

Seed enclosures, driven by intellectual property regimes, legal frameworks and the monopoly of industrial agriculture, have led to the rise in seed activism and the growing call for seed sovereignty. In working towards seed sovereignty, practitioners have been establishing seed commons. Associated with a critique of the commodification and enclosure of plant genetic resources and the governance of knowledge surrounding seeds, seed activists use the language of the commons, but there remains a lack of consensus on how to enact a seed commons, especially regarding ownership, management, and accessibility. How do indigenous and local communities use seeds to resist colonial erasure, past and present? How do seeds hold the power to bring forth unanticipated and negated futures? How do seeds defy commons categories? Through a multi-sited ethnography, I will contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of a seed commons. This research project explores seeds as sites of epistemic reclamation by local and indigenous communities and as sites of generative dissent (Hernandez Vidal and Moore, 2022).

Paper short abstract

Against platform-driven devaluation of music, the platform ASLICE prompted performing DJs to share income with musicians. This paper analyses the initiative as a social technology that sought to anticipate a fairer music economy and relational egalitarianism.

Paper long abstract

The contemporary music economy has increasingly become organised through streaming corporations and platform logics that have rendered the value of music itself negligible —especially in underground segments and marginal scenes. ASLICE, a digital platform initiative that had been active for two years before closing down in late 2024, sought to intervene in this trajectory by redistributing value in the electronic music ecosystem. It prompted DJs to allocate a share of their income to producers whose tracks they perform. As a grassroots proposition put forward by a vanguard visionary (Hilgartner 2015) together with a discourse coalition (Hajer 1993) in the underground music scene, and implemented through minimal technical means, the initiative looked to reorganise compensation relationally, anticipating solving inequity through newly facilitated and multiplying direct linkages between performing and producing music artists. As such, my paper examines ASLICE as a social technology which attempted to prototype an alternative, more egalitarian economic order within platformised music culture. I show that the initiative employed a technological frame while simultaneously invoking a community ethos, ascribing the roles different groups of users (Akrich 1992) ought to exercise in realising this anticipated future. At the same time, the platform’s closure illustrates the weight carried by non-users (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003) in particular and the limits of attempts to reconfigure platform economies through community-driven infrastructures generally. The empirical material consists of multiple semi-structured expert interviews and fieldwork undertaken at an industry-specific conference.