PANEL: Whose Future? Religious and Technoscientific Imaginaries in Contest

Visions of the future are never neutral. They encode assumptions about what is desirable, who is authorized to imagine, and which forms of knowledge are deemed capable of producing credible futures. This panel examines the competing, and sometimes converging, imaginaries through which religious, spiritual, secular, and technoscientific traditions project possible and preferable futures, and asks how power operates through these acts of future-making.

The 4S 2026 conference theme, “TechnoPower,” highlights how technoscientific capitalism concentrates power to define the future among a narrow set of actors and institutions. Yet it remains to be determined how technoscientific futurism has been influenced by and/or constructed in contra-distinction to alternative frameworks for what comes next, such as eschatological traditions, eco-spiritual movements, Indigenous cosmological temporalities, tech entrepreneurs, and secular humanist visions. These examples are not merely cultural curiosities alongside the "real" futures being built in labs and boardrooms, but are active sites of epistemic and political contestation over whose knowledge counts in shaping collective trajectories. At the same time, the boundaries between these domains are often porous: transhumanist salvation narratives borrow theological structures, apocalyptic environmentalism draws on both scientific and prophetic registers, and tech entrepreneurs invoke quasi-religious language to legitimate their visions.

This panel invites contributions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities who examine how religious, spiritual, secular, and technoscientific imaginaries compete, converge, or hybridize in the production of futures. We welcome empirical, theoretical, and historically grounded work. Topics may include, but are not limited to: transhumanism and its theological underpinnings; apocalyptic and eschatological framings in climate discourse; Indigenous temporalities as challenges to technoscientific futurism; the role of religious actors in AI ethics and governance debates; techno-utopianism as secular religion; spiritual and wellness movements as sites of alternative future-making; and the politics of hope, salvation, and redemption in innovation narratives.

Submissions are to include abstracts of up to 250 words and a brief biographical note. Abstracts should include a brief description of the main arguments, methods, and contributions to STS, and should clearly state how the submission connects to this panel and to the broader conference theme of TechnoPower / Technoscientific Futures. Please include your institution and a brief background in the bio note. 

Submission can be filled here: https://forms.gle/yMmVfvBBaZNhaHW18 

Being on the campus of Carleton College, it struck me as remarkably coincidental to have Robert Lawrence Kuhn's (whom I know!) Closer To Truth post this video while here! (Ian Barbour was the Winifred and Atherton Bean Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and Society at Carleton College and cited as one of the early pioneers of the field of science and religion.)

This is a great YouTube channel by some fellow Canadians that focus on issues related to urbanism and sustainable city development---transit, housing, etc---mostly from a Canadian perspective.