V. Imagining and Making Critical STS Futures 

Chapter 10: Imagining and Making Things Otherwise: Speculative Design and Successor Sciences

This chapter will introduce creative, expressive, and material interactions with STS concepts that invoke new ways of understanding sociotechnical systems. We seek activities based in design, fiction, and performance that employ “making and doing” approaches to STS and that draw on critical theories and practices but focus on creative and playful activities designed to encourage critique by imagining otherwise. This kind of material deliberation uses a wide range of discursive and non-discursive practices to help provide new ways to make visible the problems and environmental costs inherent in the sociotechnical systems we use. Moreover, such activities could encourage students to envision new systems that address or even transcend these problems. 

Chapter 11: Staying with the Trouble and Building New Trading Zones: Equipment for STS Citizens, Workers, and Lifelong Learners

Chapter 11 will focus on navigating complexity, embracing ambiguity, and thinking across silos with collaborators that have diverse sets of expertise. Anticipatory governance, sociotechnical integration, law lag, responsible innovation, epistemic justice, and reflexivity are some of the key concepts that we envision helping to scaffold an action-oriented approach to applying STS in the world. This chapter will also grapple with the difference between government and governance and the notion of “purity politics" versus messiness, offering ideas that challenge learners to build their capacity to think and collaborate across different types of expertise. Hands-on learning activities may involve, for example, developing interactional expertise, embracing feminist lab practices, and constructing tools for alternative knowledge production. The overarching learning goal of this chapter is to equip learners to become active participants in shaping the future and “staying with the trouble.”