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Short abstract

Participation promises access to alternative futures. Drawing on discussions of digital technologies, we show that citizens often seek to tweak rather than replace current socio-technical arrangements. Alternativity appears as relational and constrained, revealing imaginative exclusion zones.

Long abstract

A core premise of STS is that “it could be otherwise”. Connected, the availability of tangible alternatives is a central tenet of democratic life. Participatory formats are often viewed as spaces in which such alternatives are likely to emerge. Yet, how alternative are the futures assembled in participatory settings?

Drawing on four card-based citizens' discussion groups on digital technologies conducted in Austria in the context of the ERC Advanced Grant Innovation Residues (GA:101054580), this paper examines how citizens (Yuval-Davis 1999) relate digital innovations to their social-ecological implications, and to what degree citizens articulate futures that challenge or disrupt current socio-technical arrangements.

Rather than assuming alternativity in participatory contexts, we explore how alternatives feature in citizens’ discussions. We argue that - given the (digital) innovation paradigm - citizens tend to imagine futures that more often seek to tweak rather than replace current socio-technical configurations. While some proposals gesture towards redirecting futures, others foresee repairing and maintaining dominant digital innovation trajectories. This raises key questions: When and at what scale do imagined alterations qualify as alternatives – for citizens and for us, as researchers? And to what degree can we identify "imaginative exclusion zones" (Felt 2025) that tacitly delimit the spectrum of possible futures? We approach these questions by drawing on collaterality and sketching out a spectrum of alternativity in relation to the former.