230167 SE Who cares what the future brings? Understanding (techno)scientific futures (2014W)

The future plays a major role in contemporary society and thus also in science and technology. We live, as scholars have remarked, in a time of ‘breathless futurology’. Science strives for constant innovation and articulates promises about (technological) achievements that will define our collective futures. At the same time, however, collectively held imaginations of what the future will or should look like create particular spaces for (techno)science and research. How can we make sense of this relationship between the present and potential futures? How can or shall we deal with the creation of futures through technoscientific innovation? Are there ways of ‘governing the future’?
In this seminar we will discuss questions like these. You will learn to understand and analyse ‘the future’ as an object through which societal and (techno)scientific orderings are negotiated. For that purpose the seminar will start with the introduction of basic social science concepts of time and the future - meaning that we will ask what it actually is that we talk about when we talk about time or the future. Building on our newly gained understanding of these concepts we will discuss different STS case studies that look at the future from different angles.
At the end of the seminar you will be able to analyse and critically reflect on the temporal organisation of science and research as well as on practices in which different futures are created and become powerful in ordering science and society.