Call for Papers

This special issue will bring together articles exploring Popular Techno-Futures from interdisciplinary and international perspectives, including Cultural and Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies and related disciplines.

The goal of this special issue is to decenter the discussion on socio-technical futures and the role of popular culture, aesthetics and media in their (re)production. In the Global North, official policies and cultural engagements with techno-futures are predominantly driven by a small group of libertarian techno-oligarchs who, in spite of reinforcing critical and dystopian counter-discourses, propound celebratory views of technological progress – of enhancing, or overcoming the human – motivated by their desire to attract venture capital. These futures emerge as increasingly hegemonic, as governments tend to share these celebratory views to further their own interests of economic and national competitiveness. Nationalist, elitist, and often ethnocentric imaginaries and narratives blur the line between political, economic, and pop-cultural realms and become obstacles to a nuanced and inclusive discourse on the risks and benefits of future technologies. What is worse, the political surrender to capitalist and competitive growth-lock-ins disregards or even erases a vast imaginary zone of alternative futures.                  

Focused on the interests of individual nations, these narratives tend to disregard the historical and current economic entanglements between technological developments in the North and the exploitation of the South. Political and cultural media discourses in the North tend to cast the Global South as war-torn, technologically underdeveloped, and in need of help. At the same time, official national strategies in the Global North as well as the Global South foreground the use of technology to further development and economic growth. These efforts tend to disregard the economic precarity of local populations and the necropolitical exploitation of the lands of the South. Rarely acknowledged in official media discourses and dominant cultural references, these connections nevertheless emerge in counter-cultural discourses and artistic productions predominantly from the Global South which imagine their own techno-futures. Preexisting research on techno-futures and their impact on the societal acceptance, design, and use of technologies has mostly focused on the ‘key players’ of the West (and its antagonism to China), while other parts of the world have been neglected.

Conceptually, Cultural Studies and STS scholarship have long stressed the interplay between the social imagination and the de facto production of scientific facts or socio-technical authority. Contributions will work from the general premise that technologies are shaped not only by the policies and views of political or economic elites and the allocation of resources but also by various narratives and discourses drawing on popular imaginaries and cultural frameworks of techno-futures. Technology, and therefore also technological futures, are always socially situated, relational, and enmeshed in (dominant) narratives of societal sense-making, constantly reworked and understood differently by users and contexts. Narratives, in particular, have not only been understood as reservoirs of sense-making, but also as performative trajectories, causing dominant perceptions, expectations and investments – powerfully transforming future ideas into material being.

While the intersecting fields of cultural studies and STS have begun to acknowledge voices from the Global South, there is still more work to be done to arrive at a more just and inclusive picture. Such a global take on tech-futures has taken on a renewed urgency in times of rising geopolitical block formations, growing tensions, and a worrying resparking of nationalist sentiments. In this special issue, we plan to focus on forms of tech-future societal discourses from a global and popular perspective to counter the dominant Western mode of inquiry and its (de-)construction of tech-futures. Eligible articles should thus tackle (one or more of) the following questions:

• How do different forms of sense-making, like belief systems, media, cultural memory, myths, political culture, and social ideals around the globe reflect, shape, and produce their own tech-futures?

• How are these futures co-produced through local and regional experiences, histories and narratives, and how do such narratives interweave traditional and futuristic discourses to create culturally specific futurisms (Sinofuturism, Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurisms)?

• What role do the denial or promotion of, opposition or attraction to, and resistance against or adoption of Western modernist and techno-progressive paradigms play?

• How do tensions between spheres of global or local, official or informal shape artistic and media explorations of techno-futures?

• What kind of cultural productions and media embody and represent tech-futures? What is the role of the arts, stories, markets, ideals, figures, imagery, humor, narrativity etc. in transmitting and producing different techno futures?

• What kind of different hermeneutical approaches and tools exist in contribution or opposition to creating typologies, comparisons, discourses, symbols, analysis etc.?

• Which transnational patterns and connections and block formations can be identified in their development?

When submitting an abstract, authors should make explicit to which of the following categories they would like to submit their paper:

Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6000-8000 words) 

Methodological Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

Entering the Field (2000-3000 words; experimental formats welcome)

Publication schedule

March 15: Collection of abstracts

August 15: Collection of full papers

September onwards: Peer-review

Early 2026: Publication of the Special Issue

Please submit your abstract of 200-300 words until March 15, 2025 to the following email address:

techfutures@posteo.com

Publication fees

None. The issue will be made fully open access one year after initial publication.

We strongly encourage researchers and practitioners around the world (especially the ones outside, or countering, the scientific production of the global North) to submit an abstract.

Guest editors: 

Jascha Bareis

Scientific Staff at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) & Associate researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG)

Anya Heise-von der Lippe 

Assistant Lecturer with the Chair of Anglophone Literatures at the English Department of the University of Tübingen

Felix  Spremberg

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Languages and Cultures, Ghent University