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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how post‑quantum cryptography enacts risk as a sociotechnical futuring practice, revealing how openness, secrecy, and responsibility are negotiated as values in envisioning quantum and post‑quantum futures.

Paper long abstract

Development of quantum computing technologies has intensified concerns about the future durability of current cryptographic infrastructures. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) has consequently emerged as a field dedicated to developing cryptographic schemes resistant to potential quantum attacks. While PQC is often framed as a technical response to a calculable future threat, this proposal approaches quantum risk as a sociotechnical problem in which futures, values, and responsibilities are actively negotiated. Inspired by an STS perspective and sociocultural approaches to risk, this proposal treats risk not as an objective property of hazards but as a social practice through which dangers are interpreted and made meaningful. Thus, emphasizing that risk emerges from social norms, institutional arrangements, and shared worldviews that shape which dangers become major and who is responsible for addressing them rather than from probabilistic assessments alone. In this sense, risk discourses do not only describe hazards but participate in stabilizing particular social orders and technological futures. Empirically, the focus is on the field of PQC as a site where possibly contrasting epistemic values within quantum technologies are re-negotiated. Here, the speculative threat of quantum computing destabilizes 'established' epistemic values within cryptography. Classical cryptographic practice has long privileged openness and transparency as the basis for trustworthy systems while quantum imaginaries foreground secrecy, strategic anticipation, and pre-emptive security. This proposal examines ethnographically how practitioners negotiate these values while enacting quantum and post-quantum futures.