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Short abstract

This contribution adresses the conceptual underpinnings of STS approaches to unpacking alternative futures. It explores how imaginaries 'straitjacketing' future discourses to what is culturally deemed possible and plausible.

Long abstract

In the STS scholarship, ‘imagination’ is frequently treated as an agentive vacuum in which alternative or imagined futures emerge at will. However, by equating imagination with limitless fantasy the research risks overlooking deep cultural-cognitive ‘straitjackets’ invisibly bounding imagination to the past. These deep schemes define what collectives deem ‘real’ and ‘rational’, effectively constraining discourses to the possible and plausible futures.

While the concept of imaginaries has emerged within STS to address cultural ‘straitjackets’, its robustness and analytical power remain under discussion. Despite their potential, they remain “fuzzy”, often being conflated with future fantasies, used interchangeably with other concepts, and treated as a one-term theory of change. This theoretical impasse leaves the empirical phenomenon of ’straitjackets’ insufficiently scrutinized and undermines the analytical precision and the explanatory power of the research on future discourses.

This contribution delves into the conceptual foundations of STS approaches to unpacking alternative futures. We first delineate the conceptual boundaries in research on future discourses and outline the ambiguities in the conceptualizations of imaginaries. Second, to move beyond the current impasse and to propose a robust analytical framework, we redefine and reoperationalize imaginaries, grounding them in social theory and tailoring them to research on transformative change. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical applicability of our theoretical work through a longitudinal study of German hydrogen policymaking, illustrating how cultural landscapes can be systematically analyzed in practice.