Why Decenter Images of the Future Matter: Absences,Alternatives,and Accomplishments Challenging Future Visions

Introduction

The purpose of this special issue is to bring into conversation the ideas and understandings from two intellectual communities: researchers in Future Studies (FTS) and scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Both fields are interdisciplinary and disruptive with around half a century of history (Jamala, 2010; Konrad et al., 2016). In recent years, both fields have been elaborating a kind of relationship among common interests: socio-technical systems and anticipatory thinking. Yet, we can also observe a lack of interactions between the two. We open this special issue reviewing some absences, alternatives, and accomplishments in FTS and STS that scaffold their intellectual commitments and interests, in particular around the critical concept “images of the future.”

In this introductory essay, we articulate our epistemological motivations from absences that we interrogate with history, stories and concepts, and then we offer a perspective about the positive potentials and mingling of ideas from STS and FTS, and how we envision a more close and careful engagement with each other’s intellectual traditions. Then, we exemplify the alternatives, and broader conversations that have been happening at conferences and in journals that connect both areas and challenge the messiness of our communities with symmetry and humility, introducing novel ideas that before and during the pandemic times demonstrate the hits and misses of the interactions among FTS and STS. We finally situate the contributing author’s pieces that compound this special issue, pieces that interact with both fields in creative, ingenious, and loving ways and that acknowledge the value to situate and de-center the image of the future, in human and more-than-human ways.

We picked the notion of images or visions of the future—notions that we will use interchangeably—for the centrality that these have in the communities of FTS in the configuration of their understanding of their field—as object of study (Morgan, 2002; Polak and Boulding, 1973)—as well its cross-cutting applications in STS. As a foundational concept, multiple definitions of images of the future have been elaborated, yet its presence is undeniable for foresight practitioners and researchers (Aligica, 2011; Boulding, 1978). According to Maya Van Leemput, UNESCO Chair in Images of the Future and Co-creation, images of the future are fuzzy and incoherent envisionings, when they are not equipped with the proper intention (Van Leemput, 2021). FTS has developed a myriad of processes to grasp meaning on these speculations, models, and predictions and to make sense of the present from them (Albertson and Cutler, 1976; Rose, 2011).

STS is also having a surge of futures imaginations, with the popularization of the concept of socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015; Sismondo, 2020), that build on the long traditions of sociology of expectation (Brown and Michael, 2003; Borup et al., 2006) and sociologies of the future (Selin 2008; Tutton, 2017). Among these scholars, some have focused their attention on anticipatory governances of nations, organizations, and groups (Guston, 2014; Nelson et al., 2021; Ramos, 2014) that in this century have articulated a dialogue in STS about technology and futures (Dobroc et al., 2023; Lösch et al., 2019). However, we appreciate a gap between both communities, that are intellectually disconnected, and that their findings and concepts about the future are missing in conversation. This is the conversation that we aim for with this special issue, as well as our starting point for this conversation.

In our opinion, socio-technical imaginaries seem the paradigmatic example of this delinking between FTS and STS. Socio-technical imaginaries are defined as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015, 4). This multiple cited definition has a lot to unpack that is often disregarded: Who are the creators of those “visions of desirable futures”? What mechanisms do you need to capture, analyze, and assess those images? When is an imaginary just a vision? And what normativeness is implied through “social order”? These questions haunt researchers in STS, without realizing that FTS literature has explored this topic in previous decades.

Taking seriously the learnings of STS, we need to situate our knowledge to its contexts (Haraway, 1988), and embrace the plurality of worlds that emerge simultaneously from our present and speculative multisensorial knowledges with care (de la Bellacasa, 2009). As Savrasky et al. (2017) suggest, to engage with speculative research, we need to value the varieties of modes of speculation, and appreciate the layers of imagination that are making our worlds (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2018). In that way, the traditional focus of STS—experts, professionals, specialists, and innovators—gets displaced in attention when we talk about the future. STS can’t rely on in their critical and analytical innovations alone to explore the imaginations, but must enter into conversations with other disciplines and fields such as FTS scholars and practitioners, which negotiate these visions everyday with all types of people, from remote communities to large international corporations, visions of the future are not just studied, analyzed, and critiqued, but used in world-making, decision-making, and planning for futures.

Yet, both of us, co-editors of the special issue, often find ourselves in crossfire when we discuss these concepts on the intersections between STS and FTS. We’re not alone, and we build from the incredible work of previous scholars at these intersections (that we will elaborate in a further section). More often than expected, we find ourselves arguing about the plurality and scales of futures with STS scholars or against technological determinism with FTS practitioners. We are often challenged by other scholars about the validity of studying futures, or that the future itself cannot be studied, in that some consider it too trivial or ubiquitous. These experiences motivate us to produce new spaces to converge between these communities, to foster more conversation, not just at conferences, but also in publications like this one. We intentionally asked a renowned FTS journal, World Future Review, to work together on the special issue that you’re reading after a successful panel in 4S 2021 (The Society of Social Studies of Science, the largest STS conference in the world), because we aim to cross boundaries in the trenches of interdisciplinarity.

We propose in this special issue to center “images of the future” as core notions of dialogue about futurability and futurity in the spaces of science, technology, and innovation. Furthermore, we believe that to de-center images of the future is a pathway to observe and value alternatives in future making (Thomson and Bryne, 2022; Whyte et al., 2022) that allows both communities to appreciate the scales and diversity of imaginations, outside hegemonic discourses and “monofutures” (Luba, 2017; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020) that colonize our imaginations with unfeasible ideas that one-size-fits-all. We are convinced that there are not just multiple futures (List, 2006; Slaugher, 2020), but also that all images of futures require a critical examination to be able to achieve, to some degree, the transformational aspirations of creatives, thinkers, and imagineers (McCray, 2012). In that way, the synergies that STS and FTS can find with each other, and that this special issue exemplifies, promise a fertile intellectual field to collectively envision and enact those diverse ways of knowing that future-making has.

Responsibility of Future-Making/Methods

Researchers studying the future are often asked to make predictions of the future, as practitioners do. Yet, future-scholars know that everyone contributes to the production of futures, and individual foresight might be a sign of phony practice (Fergnani, 2023). The notion of future literacy, championed by Riel Miller and articulated by UNESCO has created a community of practice to educate and empower communities around the world on the practices of future making (Miller, 2007,2018) FTS have worked in the last decade with the intention of involving more perspectives, through participative methods (e.g., Ferkeu et al., 2021), international training (e.g., Kononiuk et al., 2021), and digital engagements (e.g., Bradhofer and Tengler, 2022), on the process of future making.

However, an uncanny feeling that the future is being produced and decided by few people still dominates the analysis and study of “critical futures” and much STS-analysis of the future (Sörum and Fuentes, 2022; Sartori and Theodurou, 2022). For that reason, studying the future is difficult for any type of scholar, as the future is always uncertain, multiple and complex systems require not just the inclusion of diverse human groups, but the consideration of the worlds that have been created and are being created currently—as a parliament of things (Latour, 2012 [1992]; Simons, 2017).

Richard Tutton states that “arguably, there can be no conclusion to a paper on the future” (2017, 490). Then, who is responsible for the futures that are produced? The analysis of images of the future is something that can inform the processes, and assumptions of future knowledge-making (Rubin and Linturi, 2001), changing the focus to the prediction and mediation, to the analysis of visions of the future; however, the implications of images of the future doesn’t acknowledge the power dynamics that they carry, and their producers (Inayatullah, 1990). What defines critical epistemologies of the future, is something that STS has developed more strategies and tools to lead.

One issue from FTS is lack of transparency and responsibility on the authorship and generation of future-knowledge from practitioners through black-boxed methodologies and diverse use of buzzwords to refer to the same (Frith and Tapinos, 2020). This is shown by the systematic and careful conceptual analysis of “scenario” which Spaniol and Rowland (2019) operationalized, and responses and critiques (Chermack, 2019) which resist an assessment on method, which are a way to evaluate the power dynamics involved in the process of knowledge-making. We think that here there is an space for mutual support between STS and FTS, because in a world of systems and networks, the analysts have a lot of responsibility to clarify what is included and who is excluded in the generation, framing, and dissemination of images of the future (Willig, 2014).

Although FTS and STS engage with different objects of study, the dialogue between them overlaps in ideas, methods, interests, and commitments. One issue to address in future thinking through both FTS and STS as they engage more critically with futures is that of methods and methodologies. Here, we will distinguish future thinking from futures research. As futures researchers, we are both often asked to play the role of futurist, or to make predictions of the future, as opposed to studying images and visions of the future as analytical objects in their own right (Borup et al., 2006; Brown et al., 2000). We are adamant that critical futures scholars should not predict the future, but center the “future” as an important object of inquiry through individual and collective images of the future (Borup et al., 2006; Brown et al., 2000; Selin, 2008). Sociological tools aid us in looking at the future, but do not enable us to take the social reality of futures seriously (Selin, 2008). Sociologists are not often comfortable with future thinking. Methods and theories in futures scholarship must account for the fluid nature of future making, as well as progress and change throughout the process.

Legitimation of futures is also a question at hand. Historical analysis can be used to show trends and changes over time; however, looking at the past to predict the future assumes that the future will look like the past (Selin, 2008). How, then, do we take seriously and study with care, futures that are uncertain, have not yet come to pass, and may not come to pass? Some images and visions of the future gain legitimacy through affiliation with “serious” science, while others may align with science fiction (Selin, 2008), which is not to say this is dichotomous. There are multiple and competing visions for the future and not all will come to pass. While some struggle to gain legitimacy, others become supported in many ways. The authority attached to these visions invokes questions of the political nature of promises, hope, and hype, as well as how futures are legitimated (Selin, 2008). Temporality and power relations must be kept in mind, as well as the cultural, political, and economic conditions from which future visions arise. Who is legitimating what? Whose visions gain credibility, whose don’t gain traction and why? Who are futures being created for? Who gets to create futures? To whom do technoscientific futures hold meaning? “…social scientists have more value not as futurists per say but as scholars seriously interested in the future and responsible for asking how it is constructed, by whom, through what means, and with what consequences” (Selin, 2008, 1889). Although studying the future often places an emphasis on future technologies, these technologies do not exist without cultural and social context and consequences.

The Binarisms in Technoscience

Technoscience is and has been a central focus of future-making, and FTS has a strong connection with technological thinking, since their nuclear and military origins in the 60s (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2000) and organizational applications from the 80s and 90s (Gordon et al., 2020), to the increasing attention to environmental futures to deal with the anthropogenic effects of our unequal and unbalanced ways of industrial living.

Here, the STS notion of “co-production” reminds us that technologies are always a part of social and cultural spaces (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). In our socio-technical worlds, the technologies which are framed as solutions are expected to improve and manage the unknown (Morozov, 2013; Rosner, 2013). While the STS concept of co-production warns us about the blind spots of technological solutionism, this concept is surprisingly uncommon in many FTS projects (Durose et al., 2022; Jasanoff and Simmet, 2021).

With the uncertainty of the future comes a social preoccupation over our futures, as images of the future tend to present us with “glaring uncertainties” and “unintentional consequences” making us uneasy and peaking our interest in making sense of the future (Brown et al., 2000). Associated with increased feelings of fear and anxiety over the “loss of control” of what the future may hold (Brown et al., 2000; Ellul, 1974; Giddens, 1998; Winner, 1983), the more knowledge we attain, the more potential risk for the future we can see (Brown et al., 2000). In the scenario of a human-catalyzed climate emergency creeping into our geographies, the recent COVID-19 global pandemic and its continued disruptions to labor, education, and life unfold, an increasingly democratic and ontological polarization make a call for action towards alternative and diverse futures that is compelling yet dangerous to producing new worlds that are even more dangerous than the one that we currently share.

Pivotal in our images and imaginings of the future must include a nuanced and caring approach to technologies in future making for humans and non-humans (de la Bellacasa, 2011, 2017). As the built-environments that simultaneously empower and disenfranchise our nature and behaviors, technologies are often scrutinized in their early phases, to avoid risk for the public; however, scholars investigating early-stage technological development are at risk of being put in the center of these politics (Selin, 2008). Approaching technologies in the future as good or bad, positive or negative is a moral mistake. Those binaries are dangerous! (Haraway, 1988). Yet, abundant futures conversations focus on false dichotomies, dualisms that both fields seek to confront with different strategies and concepts to resist the binaries of extreme pessimism or fanciful optimism, utopia, and dystopia (Farnell, 2021; Gordin et al., 2010).

Technologies are a powerful worldmaker that allow humans to populate our visioning of functions and actions. Juan David Reina-Rozo (2021) elaborates a powerful dissection of the role of technology in Solar Punk stories in the south, increasing the socio-technical awareness of these solar-powered visions of the future. When we reduce futures to dichotomic assumptions and are constrained by the values of hegemonic or dominant images of the future, we neglect the diversity within alternative futures (De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). We, therefore, aim to interrogate images and narratives of the future beyond the spotlight of utopias and/or dystopias, as extremes of imagination stereotype technologies and tend to reproduce short-term technological solutionism, technological determinism, and other kinds of socio-technical shortcomings that disrupt our understandings of current cosmological crises.

Scales of Future Making

Interconnecting technology and futures requires further nuance to be scholarly discussed and studied, and from our perspective, one key missing dimension is the discussion about scales. As we can appreciate the ethics and politics of scaling digital technologies in terms of experimentation, applicability, and future-oriented impact (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022), we should also acknowledge the other perspective: That images of the future have scales because not all of them scope nor require the same range of action. While some images of the future are deeply intimate and individually motivational, like the ones that can produce The Theater of Becoming (Baena, 2022), other images produce or build upon national or transnational narratives, that can affect millions of people, places, or things (Bratton, 2016; Hong, 2020, Osterblom et al., 2022).

Understanding that humans share and negotiate uncertainty through multiscale images is a dimension that we would like to see and draw more attention in both fields. As we appreciate the rich and detailed value that images of the future articulate as central units of imagination, from the nurturing of FTS. Images and visions can be articulated around other people’s produced shared meanings and coordination. Surprisingly, the multiscale dimensions appear in other fields besides STS and FTS, in the form of psychological expectations (Oettingen and Mayer, 2002), ecosystem scenarios (Biggs et al., 2007), speculative media fictions (Jeffries, 2022), and even future stories (Veland and Lynch, 2016) by different intellectual traditions which engage with temporalities beyond the human.

We identify that futures operate in three interconnected and transitional levels: images or vision, stories or narratives, and imaginations or imaginaries (anticipatory, socio-technical, social, or other kinds). These levels constitute a transformational realm of imaginations and speculations that guide, motivate, cultivate, and interrogate our relationships with time. Following Weh (2020), and inspired by Geels( 2010), we offer a transitional and socio-technical perspective about futuring, where we can appreciate how different these speculative strata can affect different populations.

We want to offer our own definitions and articulations in how imagination transitions among scales, to frame later how we read the scales of futuring and how the contributions in this special issue enact them in research and action.

- Level 1: Images or visions of the future are centered on Polak’s (1973) framing of the concept, these are mental models that may or not be share with others. Images are often incomplete, messy, contradictory and in the works, yet help us to structure an understanding of the world. Images are individually or collectively constructed, as representations of reality (past, present or future), incorporating values and assumptions (Boulding, 1956). Visions can be contested around desirability, feasibility and other foresight properties.

In our studies and conversation between STS and FTS, we often struggle to differentiate which of them are in action. This lack of distinctions that we often observe and discuss motivates us to think about the notion of decentering. But to displace something from its center, we need first to clearly detect its centrality. For us, decentering the image of the future is also to displace narratives and imaginaries from its position, to more carefully attend their particularities in social and interdisciplinary research. Current studies that deal with visions as imaginaries fail to inform the relevance of scale in scoping of futures.

The power of images of the future motivates action and change in different communities and contexts requires to situate the extension of the imagined and its representations. To foster and drive collective action, such as those that Afrofuturists creators have crafted about the interplanetary expressions of future black identities on human interstellar civilization (Anderson, 2016; Butler, 2021; Philips, 2015); contesting dominant white imaginations about the future (Michell and Chaudhury, 2020) or recalling the limitations of racial futurities in their possibilities of action (Davis, 2022) identify the scope of those sources is crucial to assess its contribution to specific conversations.

Transformative images of the future operate in diverse modalities to enroll different communities in their perspectives, being individual, collective, organizational or global, these forms can be inscribed on documents, discussions, comics, posters, or cartoons that communicate informed speculations that make sense of our multiplicity and uneven worlds in which we co-exist (Escobar, 2018; Hutchings, 2019). We also observe that these modalities are not a limitation for the scales of imagination.

This proposal of a three-layered space of imagination is necessary to bring more attention to how we analytically and critically appreciate future-making as a process and imagination as a knowledge system. A robust collection of methodologies for the analysis of images of the future—its collection, processing, systematization, and agglomeration—will allow a more fair and effective appreciation of visions of the future. To situate images of the future, we need to assess their context of production, intentionality, and scale, not just its discourse. A more caring and careful understanding of these visions and its impacts can emerge from a dedicated interrogation of scales of imagination.

In this form, scaling futures offers a new way to situate (in scope and intent) our images of the future, as well offer a way of articulating discussions that interdisciplinary communities have been struggling to place around the production and consumption of images of the futures, such the hard-to-operationalize strategies of futuring that socio-technical imaginaries conveys in studies centered in this concept. Futures are generated from a collective, contingent, and implicit process of knowledge-making, hence, acknowledging the differences of power, intention, scope, and action that are envisioned. It is important to find its centers and decentered it, to avoid the catastrophist discourses of single future and to manage the overwhelming multiplicity, diversity, and dynamism inherent in images of the future into a canvas of imagination, scales are a fundamental absence that STS and FTS need to engage with.

What Does it Means to Decenter the Future?

Responsibility, Binarisms, and Scales are absences that we want to point attention to up front, because these dimensions are relevant to the process of decentering. In this issue, we commit to exploring what becomes “de-centered” on techno-scientific futures, meaning we are looking at ways to displace, detach, and disassemble systems of knowledge and power to articulate new perspectives about the future.

Rather than observe the “pull of the present,” “the push or the past” (Ferganani, 2020; Inuyatallah, 2008), or “the pulsion for progress” (Marx 1987), we advocate for a careful exploration of images of the future, that not just observe the elements around a temporal triangle, but the placing around systems that are implicit in the images of the future and technoscientific discourses, using the critical perspectives of STS and the creative rigors of FTS in an analytical act of resistance to centralized futures, such as hyped technological narratives (Milne, 2020; Vinsel and Russel, 2020), trendy methodological innovations (Dalhgren et al., 2022), or promising discourses that reinforce the current power dynamics of futures (e.g., French et al., 2021; Irwin, 2019).

A condition for decenter is to observe systems, elements, and dynamics, to appreciate how images are compositions of multiple sources—visual, sensorial, historical, paradigmatic, creative—to decenter, we may need to dissect the images and visions from these elements, as media scholars perform a visual analysis to find their elements. Decentering is not just a condition for de-futuring, but also a requirement for creating deeply radical alternative futures (Blauvert, 2019). Some of the pieces ahead perform a systemic analysis of their futures discourses from the matrixes—modalities, formats—that contain them. In literature, museums, webpages, and schools, as is present in this special issue, images of the future get extracted to be decentered. However, we like to recognize that not all aspects are absent between the STS and FTS communities. In the next section, we want to observe the notion of alternative images, to develop further the notion of decentering before introducing the pieces that compound this special issue.