10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17576
In the last decade, science and technology studies have paid increasing attention to the role of futures, anticipatory expectations, and forward-looking statements in co-defining the nexus between science, technology and society. This broad interest is articulated into several research streams, from the assessment of long-term futures of technological innovation and setting out how future-oriented socio-technical imaginaries act upon real-time technoscientific innovation to actionable anticipatory frameworks and scenarios adopted to intervene in science, technology and innovation governance. This paper introduces the special section Disentangling Features, which collects four lectures from the teaching and mutual learning activities held during the VI STS Italia Summer School, organised at the University of Padova in September 2022. By situating the four lectures within a composite conceptual framework, the paper discusses the relationship between the future and technoscientific processes in the context of science and technology studies with an emphasis on the performative role of futures and imaginaries in co-shaping knowledge-making practices and technological developments.
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Stefano Crabu
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Disentangling Futures from a Science and Technology Studies Perspective
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Stefano Crabu
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10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17576
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art-science collaborations
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Disentangling Futures from a Science and Technology Studies Perspective
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                                                           Introductory Essay
Disentangling Futures from a Science
and Technology Studies Perspective

Stefano Crabu, Paolo Magaudda
University of Padova


     Abstract: In the last decade, science and technology studies have paid in-
     creasing attention to the role of futures, anticipatory expectations, and
     forward-looking statements in co-defining the nexus between science,
     technology and society. This broad interest is articulated into several re-
     search streams, from the assessment of long-term futures of technological
     innovation and setting out how future-oriented socio-technical imaginaries
     act upon real-time technoscientific innovation to actionable anticipatory
     frameworks and scenarios adopted to intervene in science, technology and
     innovation governance. This paper introduces the special section Disentan-
     gling Features, which collects four lectures from the teaching and mutual
     learning activities held during the VI STS Italia Summer School, organised at
     the University of Padova in September 2022. By situating the four lectures
     within a composite conceptual framework, the paper discusses the rela-
     tionship between the future and technoscientific processes in the context
     of science and technology studies with an emphasis on the performative
     role of futures and imaginaries in co-shaping knowledge-making practices
     and technological developments.

     Keywords: future; technoscientific expectations; socio-technical imagi-
     naries; promises; art-science collaborations.

     Submitted: November 10, 2022 – Accepted: December 28, 2022
     Corresponding author: Paolo Magaudda, Department of Philosophy, So-
     ciology, Education and Applied Psychology, Via Cesarotti 10/12, 35123, Pa-
     dova, Italy. Email: paolo.magaudda@unipd.it



1. Introduction
    In which ways and under which conditions do socio-technical expecta-
tions, promises and imaginaries co-shape the nexus between science, tech-
nology and societies? How are future scenarios entangled with policymak-
ing and decision-making processes about technoscientific innovations and
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TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
13 (2) pp. 5-12 - ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2022
6                                                            Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


developments? In which ways can art, exhibitions and “art–science” exper-
iments cross-fertilise the understanding of social, cultural and ethical issues
at stake in the context of new and emerging sciences and technologies?
Such questions are currently at the core of several research streams at the
intersection of science and technology studies (STS), the sociology of ex-
pectations, and media and cultural studies that are concerned with analys-
ing how and to what extent promissory narratives, forward-looking state-
ments and expectations are not only hypothetical discursive entities navi-
gating towards uncertain and unfathomable future scenarios but also per-
formative objects at work in real-time practices (Konrad et al. 2017).
     This special section of “Tecnoscienza” hosts four invited lectures from
the teaching and mutual learning activities held during the VI STS Italia
Summer School titled Disentangling Futures: Promises, Scenarios, Experi-
ments organised at the University of Padova in September 2022.1 The sci-
entific programme of the summer school were deeply entangled with an
ensemble of analytical issues, theoretical perspectives and concepts that in
the last few years have emerged with renewed vitality in the STS field
with the aim of respecifying the analytical lenses and methodological ap-
proaches in the understanding of technoscientific innovation processes –
i.e., how the performative role of futures, anticipatory expectations and
imaginaries is actively engaged in co-shaping knowledge-making practices
and technological developments.
     In the context of STS, the identification of the future as an analytical
focal point for analysing technoscientific phenomena surfaced around the
1990s and split into several research streams. This fertile debate, which
explores how real-time technoscientific practices mobilise and intertwine
with future-oriented narratives, has provided a conceptual scaffold for the
teaching and mutual learning activities carried out during the VI STS Ita-
lia Summer School in Padova. Such activities have coalesced within the
lectures collected in this special section that covers various issues, from
the assessment of long-term futures of technological innovation that helps
scholars and policymakers consider how future-oriented socio-technical
imaginaries act upon real-time technoscientific innovation to actionable
anticipatory frameworks and normative scenarios adopted to intervene in
science, technology and innovation governance and policymaking.
     The conceptual scaffold of the summer school – as the four lectures
outline – relies on the acknowledgement that the research body about the
role of imaginaries, discourses and practices related to the construction of
technoscientific futures is increasingly articulated. In this respect, a cru-
cial turning point in the STS literature about the role of the narrativisa-
tion of the future can be traced back to the early 1990s with the emer-
gence of a distinctive sociology of expectations pioneered by Harro Van
Lente (1993) in his widely cited PhD thesis. In subsequent years, this
seminal work evolved into a broad research stream intensely focused on
the role of future-oriented narratives as a crucial element in sustaining the
Crabu, Magaudda                                                           7

mobilization and alignment of material and immaterial resources, skills
and public interest around emerging, and sometimes controversial tech-
noscientific fields, such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and post-
genomic developments (Brown et al. 2000; Burop et al. 2006). A wide ar-
ray of concepts and perspectives have emerged to advance the study of
the performative nature of future-oriented technoscientific expectations
and visions. Performativity here refers to the relevance of considering and
locating anticipatory knowledge and future-oriented visions within the
multiple dynamics of real-time innovation practices. Such practices give
shape to heterogeneous networks in which diverse agents can cooperate
and conflict by mobilising various resources (e.g., available technologies,
financial means, legal frameworks, scientific evidence and deliberative
procedures) as well as visions and expectations about suitable or undesir-
able futures to acquire support for materialising their ideas in cogent and
actual scenarios that may orient everyday research activities and living
experiences (Brown and Michael 2003; Michael 2000).
    More recently, the notion of socio-technical promises has gained fur-
ther relevance among scholars and policymakers interested in under-
standing how the management of visions related to futures – which also
embed values, ethical statements and notions about potential benefits or
disadvantages arising from innovations – is actively performed by re-
search and innovation communities within a “promissory regime” (Apre-
da et al. 2014; Audétat et al. 2015). Following this line of inquiry, con-
cepts such as “promissory organizations” (Pollock and Willimas 2010)
and “promissory bio-objects” (Crabu 2014) have been elaborated to en-
hance the understanding of the relationships between anticipatory
knowledge, technoscientific expectations and forward-looking statements
on the one hand, and the sociomaterial dimension of knowledge-making
practices and technological innovation on the other.
    Within this perspective, the notion of socio-technical imaginaries (Jas-
anoff and Kim 2015) became widely adopted to address the implications
and dynamics related to the narrativisation and symbolic dimension of
technoscience in society. The notion of socio-technical imaginaries allows
scholars and practitioners to address and disentangle how the social, nor-
mative and institutional future-oriented visions and expectations can influ-
ence and orient collective choices, preferences, values and behaviours
about what is desirable and appropriate or inappropriate in the context of
our everyday technologically dense societies (see Bruni et al. 2013).
    Within this ongoing debate about the role of imaginaries in the con-
text of science and technological innovation, the four lectures comprising
this special section further contribute to disentangling the ways in which
anticipatory expectations and forward-looking statements may act as dis-
cursive devices capable of reshuffling and reshaping the modalities and
conditions under which various stakeholders and concerned groups of
people manage real-time technoscientific issues. It is worth noting that
8                                                           Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


the narrativisation of technoscientific innovation seems to be particularly
relevant when breakthrough devices, research programmes and emerging
scientific fields are increasingly exposed in the public sphere to manufac-
ture legitimacy and social acceptance of innovations (e.g., human genome
editing, human enhancement and self-driving car).
     While expectations are crucial in framing and co-defining the settings,
conditions and arrangements within which technoscientific phenomena
occur, in the lecture The Roots of Neglect: Towards a Sociology of Non-
Imagination, Barbara Prainsack (2022) makes the case that the lack or ab-
sence of (alternative) expectations may also have a role in shaping the fu-
ture itself. Starting from the widely accepted assumption that the performa-
tive power of visions and expectations can orient the multiple ways of be-
ing, knowing and intervening in our everyday dense societies (e.g., which
projects to finance, who should handle them, who should enjoy their bene-
fits, and who should be responsible for any negative consequences), Prain-
sack shows how the absence of desirable counter visions and narratives
about the future can explain why concerned group of people do not trigger
a change of highly questionable socio-technical regimes and related ar-
rangements that can be perceived as detrimental to human and planetary
well-being. Hence, in outlining a sociology of non-imagination, Prainsack
calls for the need to analyse and understand the ways in which the absence
of counter-visions defines the scaffold for the perpetuation of various forms
of injustice and exploitation of people and the environment.
     By opening a critical reading of the anticipatory governance perspec-
tive, this lecture allows us to consider another crucial dimension of the VI
STS Italia Summer School, namely the collective experiments that can
help us address the role of the narrativisation of the future, intended not
only as a tool deeply subsumed by hegemonic neoliberal technoscience
but also as a potential trigger for new critical and reflective perspectives
on the interrelations between science, technology, politics and society. In
particular, experiments in the co-creation and creative appropriation of
scientific knowledge and technologies have paved the way for new forms
of public engagement and inclusion in various technoscientific domains,
thus leading to a reassessment of the interrelations between science, tech-
nology and society, while framing citizens and diverse stakeholders as ac-
tive agents in shaping new potential configurations of the science-society
relationship (Lezaun et al. 2017; Marres 2012).
     The focus on the imaginative power of experiments and other novel
trajectories of interaction between societal actors and research and inno-
vation communities leads us to another key dimension addressed in the
context of the summer school and then elaborated by the aforementioned
lectures: the role of fictional narratives. Fictional representations of tech-
noscience – including movies, literature and comics – have already started
to be integrated into the analysis of emerging innovations. For example,
this can be observed in studies on popular culture representations of
Crabu, Magaudda                                                           9

emerging innovations such as human cloning (Nerlich et al. 2001) and
nanotechnologies (Millburn 2008). This body of research also highlights
how scientists themselves can be directly or indirectly engaged in fictional
imaginative production (Kirby 2011). As outlined by Marc Audétat
(2022) in his lecture titled Promising Technosciences in the Economy of
Attention, fiction should be considered tools for re-imagining counternar-
ratives or counterfictions that can trigger imaginative processes useful for
developing new theoretical lenses that can be used to better understand
contemporary technoscience. In his contribution, Audétat introduces a
fresh dialogue between cultural and media studies and STS to expand the
sociology of expectations and focus on how technoscientific visions can
gain public resonance and popularity by circulating within the public
sphere. Starting from this analytical premise, Audédat elucidates how and
under what conditions technoscience is framed as a matter of promising
and visionary practices and discusses the implications raised by such
practices in respecifying the interface between science and society.
    Following this line of inquiry about highly mediatised and spectacu-
larised technologies, a lecture by Philippe Sormani (2022) titled Remak-
ing Intelligence? Of Machines, Media, and Montage critically reflects on
the current renewed interest in artificial intelligence, especially machine
learning techniques, as a technoscientific field marking the spectacular
revival of automated induction. Sormani mobilises an ethnomethodologi-
cal approach and develops a practice-based video analysis of a demon-
stration of “machine intelligence.” By examining the complex interplay
between machines, media and montage, the lecture highlights how specif-
ic forms of “enchanted determinism” (Campolo and Crawford 2020) are
enacted as situated performance.
    A final point at the centre of the summer school, articulated in the
closing lecture by Silvia Casini (2022) titled That Obscure Object of De-
sire: Some Notes for a Slow Art-Science, concerns the role of art and artis-
tic exhibitions in shaping and understanding technoscientific-driven in-
novation processes (see Halpern et al. 2022; Sormani et al. 2018). As out-
lined by Casini, art-science collaborations can be considered privileged
loci for experimenting with new visions and imaginaries about technosci-
ence. As such, art-science collaborations elicit critical reflections about
the nexus between science, technology, politics and society and invite us
to dismantle and cross epistemic, disciplinary and professional bounda-
ries. By highlighting the transformative power of art-science-based exper-
imentation and critically overcoming naïve conceptions of creativity,
Casini adeptly outlines art-science collaborations as a strategy for cross-
fertilizing and reframing strategies of engagement in technoscience.
    Overall, this special section invites scholars, policymakers and con-
cerned stakeholders to rethink the role of expectations and future-based
narratives in innovation dynamics, thus reopening the doors of science
and technology to unexpected agents, discourses and skills. This is urgent,
10                                                                  Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


since contemporary challenges such as the current global climate, health,
social and political crises not only necessitate assessments of the temporality
of technoscientific innovation processes in the present, with their contro-
versies and conflicts, but also imply the need for a collective and creative
effort to draw more sustainable and socially desirable futures.


Notes

     The VI STS Italia Summer School was held in Padua from 27 September to 1 Oc-
     1

tober 2022 and was organised by STS Italia in collaboration with the Department of
Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (Fisspa), the Padova Sci-
ence Technology and Innovation Studies (Pa.S.T.I.S.) research unit of the University
of Padua, the STS Lab of the University of Lausanne with the support of the European
Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the journal
“Tecnoscienza.” See http://www.stsitalia.org/6th-sts-italia-summer-school-disentangling-
futures-promises-scenarios-experiments-27th-to-october-1st-2022-padova-italy/.


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