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- Convenor:
-
Claudia Mendes
(University of Hamburg)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel interrogates collaborative future-making in and as scientific practice. The combined format examines concrete tools and methods e.g. inspired by speculative design or participatory foresight, and explores wider implications for academia and the role STS could be equipped to play in this.
Description
As reflected in the conference theme, STS scholarship has long explored the "more-than-now". Opening and shaping alternative sociotechnical futures has been intertwined with democratizing knowledge production and technology development through openness, participation and public engagement. Recently, collaborative future-oriented methodologies seem to proliferate across a much wider range of academic disciplines and contexts. Practices such as speculative design, scenario techniques, foresight workshops or participatory modeling are gaining traction within basic research (e.g., modeling plausibility in climate science, fostering pandemic preparedness), teaching (e.g., imagining higher education in the era of AI), or at the science-policy-interface. While participatory research has traditionally engaged diverse publics in knowledge production or design of concrete tools or applications, these approaches differ by explicitly targeting futures.
This combined panel thus interrogates science-based practices and politics of co-designing futures, asking: What happens when futures become sites of collaborative intervention rather than expert prediction?
Contributions are invited to explore these questions from two complementary angles. In the workshop session, we examine specific tools and devices by trying out, reverse-engineering, or otherwise engaging reflexively with them. In the paper session, we address broader implications: Who is invited to these future-making spaces, what do they enable or foreclose? How are expertise or scientificity enacted and negotiated? Where do these practices become performative, how and for whom? What role can, or should STS play in these collaborations?
Panel Format:
Each contribution takes two forms:
1. Traditional paper presenting the case study with theoretical discussion and critical reflection
2. Tool demonstration where authors showcase a specific co-design method from their empirical work, preferably in an interactive, hands-on way
Abstracts should introduce the paper; include a short description of the tool you want to demonstrate and specify any practical requirements. Please also clarify whether methods were developed by the authors or encountered in their field - both are welcome as they offer different analytical perspectives.
Accepted contributions
Session 1Short abstract
Whose futures matter? Stakeholder meetings and participatory research often generate as much absence as collaboration. Based on two fieldwork cases in Ghana, this paper explores what STS can contribute when the politics of gathering shape the futures constructed.
Long abstract
Collaborative future-making in science often begins with a gathering. Stakeholder meetings, participatory workshops, and multi-sectoral launches have become routine technologies for assembling the voices that supposedly matter. But who decides whose voice matters? And what happens to futures that never get a seat at the table? This paper interrogates these questions through ethnographic observation of two settings within Ghana's national agricultural research system: a participatory varietal selection (PVS) exercise and the launch of a multi-stakeholder nutrition project. Both spaces were created as collaborative environments and imagined futures on paper. However, they also resulted in absences—people who were not invited, unable to attend, attended but remained silent, or whose presence was merely ceremonial rather than impactful. Drawing on STS scholarship on participation and its limits (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2020; Joly, 2015), the paper asks what these gatherings accomplish beyond their stated aims. It argues that stakeholder mapping is inherently biased: it enacts theories, embeds assumptions about whose knowledge is valued, and makes certain futures seem impossible before any discussion starts. The paper explores what it means for STS researchers to study these dynamics not as implementation failures, but as the mundane yet consequential politics of future-making (York, 2018; Kastenhofer and Vermeulen, 2024).
Keywords: Participation, collaboration, future-making, agricultural research, Ghana.
Demonstration: Participants reverse-engineer a PVS exercise and a stakeholder workshop using anonymised fieldwork materials to map who was present and absent, and collectively reflect on what STS can offer when exclusion is built into the design.
Short abstract
This contribution demonstrates a participatory scenario planning tool for humble engagement with normative uncertainty in hydrogen transitions, allowing participants to engage with value change, value conflict, value incommensurability and moral ambiguity.
Long abstract
Hydrogen futures play a central role in contemporary energy transition governance, yet they are often shaped by reductionist assumptions about society and the stability of normative orientations and values. We conceptualise humility as the acknowledgment of ongoing and irreducible normative uncertainty arising from value conflict, value incommensurability, value change, and moral uncertainty. This paper proposes participatory scenario planning as a methodology for enabling more reflexive and humble engagement with hydrogen futures.
Participatory scenario planning has been identified as a promising technology of humility in energy governance, yet it has not been applied to hydrogen transitions. Unlike futuring approaches that converge on preferred pathways or stabilise expectations, it centres inclusiveness, multiplicity, contingency, and divergence. By enabling diverse actors to collaboratively construct and interpret multiple possible futures, the method resists political reductions of uncertainty and accommodates normative pluralism.
In this paper, we developed participatory scenario planning as a technology of humility for hydrogen transitions and report on how we have piloted the approach in a series of multi-actor future-making workshops. In the workshop component of this panel, we intend to demonstrate the method and invite participants to engage with key steps of constructing plural hydrogen futures and reflexively engaging with normative uncertainties.
Short abstract
This paper examines a speculation workshop in which participants remix 100-word fictional descriptions of parallel worlds to explore desired visions of alternative fashion systems. It illustrates how participatory settings shape what futures can be imagined and which visions acquire epistemic value.
Long abstract
This paper investigates collaborative future-making within Fashion Fictions, a participatory speculation project founded by the author in 2020 that has involved more than 7,000 people worldwide. The project invites participants to imagine and explore alternative fashion systems through structured processes of writing, prototyping and enactment, guided by desire and curiosity rather than expert prediction or technical modelling. This generative activity produces new narratives and nurtures an expanded sense of possibility among participants.
The paper focuses on one accessible workshop format from the project: a cut-and-paste activity in which 100-word descriptions of fictional parallel worlds, previously contributed to the project’s online repository, are playfully remixed. Participants adapt, combine and build on propositions authored by other contributors to create new worlds that reflect their own interests and priorities. While the remix method lowers barriers by eliminating the blank page, the use of existing material introduces constraints and challenges participants to think laterally and creatively.
Using this remix activity as a focus, the paper investigates how the architectures of participatory settings organise imaginative horizons. It recognises participatory speculation workshops as materially and procedurally structured environments that shape what can be imagined; how visions can be expressed; and how speculative propositions acquire, or do not acquire, epistemic value. Shifting attention from the content of imagined futures to the infrastructural conditions that organise their emergence and stabilisation, the paper contributes to STS debates on collaborative future-making and the politics of co-designing futures.
The workshop activity requires only printed sheets, scissors, glue and pens.
Short abstract
We analyse the fishbowl discussion as a methodology that both studies and performs the organisation of interdisciplinary collaboration, reflecting on how such participatory formats can support the co-creation of collective futures and contribute to collaboratively defined STS research programmes.
Long abstract
Academic knowledge production is shaped by, and often reproduces, socio-economic and institutional hierarchies. Intellectual agendas tend to be guided by established figures, making it difficult for junior scholars and adjacent communities to fully participate. This dynamic favours continuity over experimentation and is widely recognised as a challenge in contemporary research culture (Lundberg et al., 2025; Pardo-Guerra, 2022; Sørensen, 2023). In this context, how can an STS community collectively define a future research agenda while remaining attentive to the very dynamics of participation, hierarchy, and knowledge production that STS itself studies?
This paper reflects on an experimental workshop organised by the Science and Technology Studies Cambridge Network (SCaN) that used a fishbowl discussion format to co-produce a shared research agenda. The fishbowl — a rotating conversation structure in which participants can move between listening and speaking positions — was deployed not only as a facilitation technique but also as a reflexive device for observing how voice, authority, and collaboration are organised within interdisciplinary academic communities.
Participants were invited to address two guiding questions: what does Science, Technology and Society look like in a science-led city such as Cambridge, and what might a shared STS research programme in this context entail? The dynamic circulation of participants redistributed conversational authority and enabled unexpected interventions from researchers, practitioners, and STS-adjacent actors. In practice, these interactions reshaped the planned structure of the workshop itself, prompting organisers to adapt the facilitation and reconsider how collective outputs should emerge.
Short abstract
Drawing on research on emerging digital contraceptive technologies, this article advances an approach to studying sociotechnical imaginaries as ethico-onto-epistemological enactments. I show how research shapes what counts as an imaginary, whose voices matter, and which futures become imaginable.
Long abstract
Sociotechnical imaginaries are a widely used framework for understanding futures as co-produced through society and technology. However, existing research tends to privilege discrete stakeholder perspectives while sidelining the more diverse people, contexts, and practices through which technoscientific futures are made to matter. Drawing on empirical research on emerging 'digital contraceptives', this article advances an approach to studying sociotechnical imaginaries as ethico-onto-epistemological enactments. I argue that imaginaries are not pre-existing objects waiting to be identified, but are produced through research encounters that shape what counts as an imaginary, whose voices matter, and which futures become imaginable.
I show how this premise shaped my research across two interrelated studies: (1) an online exploratory mapping of the ‘digital contraceptive imaginary’ using Google Search to assemble a corpus of diverse materials from various stakeholders; and (2) creative qualitative workshops inviting potential users to encounter and intervene in the imaginary. In this presentation, I will demonstrate the workshop format, including visual prompt cards and a speculative design exercise, adapted from Søndergaard’s ‘Troubling Design’ framework.
From this approach, I offer three reflections on researching futures as sites for collaborative intervention. First, I show what becomes visible when attention shifts from comparison between discrete imaginaries to the complexity within a singular enactment. Second, I argue that collectives, institutions, and publics should be assembled empirically rather than assumed. Third, I demonstrate the value of creative qualitative methods as modest interventions in how futures are imagined and enacted otherwise.
Key words: Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Publics, Creative Qualitative Workshops, Inventive Methods.