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Short abstract

Based on the approach of socio-technical imaginaries as situated and performative narratives, this paper presents the visions of the future that bachelor students have been asked to write for a participatory research program dedicated to narratives and agency in the ecological transformation.

Long abstract

Visions and promises of tech-intensive futures are means to colonize the imaginary and pave the way to emerging technoscientific industries (Brown 2001 ; Joly 2010 ; Jasanoff and Kim 2015 ; Audétat et al. 2015). Indeed, visions promoted by stakeholders do narrow down and mask the plurality of socio-technical imaginaries that envision environmental transformations and technology in society. But what are the actual adherence to, and affects associated with, the various socio-technical imaginaries, including the contemporary and often extreme technosolutionism? One of the first goals of the four year STRIVE project of the University of Lausanne is to study the representations of sociotechnical imaginaries of bachelor students with the letter from the future method (Sools 2020). Students of different disciplines are asked to imagine themselves in 25 years and write a letter to their self in the present time, express emotions, aspirations and concerns. The findings show narratives that reflect heterogeneous, nuanced, and affectively diverse representations of the future that challenge assumptions about Western deterministic sociotechnical imaginary (Durosier et al., 2026). The knowledge gathered with the letters from the future is going to be used to design participatory exercises based on future thinking methods, to be held in the tech managers and the educational milieus, as means to foster critical literacy about technoscientific promises and encourage participants to avoid passive attitudes toward the (their) future. The researchers of the STRIVE program are keen to learn and exchange about workshopping techniques in order to design the next phases of their project.