Fertile Soil for the Imaginary

Written by Lilian Karr

Sociotechnological Imaginaries shape how we see the world and influence our decision-making. Those imaginaries happen on different planes. For example, there are national sociotechnical imaginaries: “collectively imagined forms of social life and social order reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects.” When reading what Sheila Jasanoff (2015) – in Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity – Laura Tozer and Nicole Klenk (2018) – in Discourses of Carbon Neutrality and Imaginaries of Urban Futures – write about different sociotechnical imaginaries, a string of questions started to formulate in my head.

The examples that were presented, concerning how futures can be imagined facing the climate changes, seemed to be happening on a different level than day-to-day happenings. Yet we all know: in order to prevent catastrophic climate change-related disasters, everyone will have to take measures at some point. It is necessary to work on solutions in practicable, every day steps, that become habits, that include everybody and empower positive change and the feeling of agency. How can we save the climate if no one is committed? I wonder how we can find ways to share strategies on a “common” level, so that we as the people that aren’t decision-makers in the field of regulations and policies won’t feel singled-out in caring about the climate. How can we have sociotechnical imaginaries on the levels that we operate on?

Then I asked myself: how can we dismantle which imaginaries we have encountered? Can we analyse how strongly they have influenced our worldview? Granted, dismantling them proves to be hard, but while reading about different imaginaries I wondered: How come that I had never gotten in touch with positive visions for the future, solution planning or green-city projects in any other way than when actively looking them up? Living in Germany my recollection told me that I had only gotten bad news reading apocalyptic newspaper headlines or browsing on the internet seeing ads from Greenpeace or WWF.

Having taken a course on transgenerational transference of trauma in which we talked at length about Germany’s history and how it affected individuals and society, I asked myself: how does our collective national imaginary look? How is it influenced, when it is so hard ­– on different subconscious levels – to “feel German,” to not take pride in having German ancestors, because it has always been a bad association?

My guess is: it is not the best soil for creating positive sociotechnical imaginaries that have a wide base and include many individuals. “Feeling German” has always felt a little shameful and it also felt isolating because we don’t share a patriotic national feeling: national community often comes close to patriotism, and that is heavily prejudiced in Germany. Is it, in a society that is more criticized because of its history, like Germany, more difficult to create an impact by community-centered efforts? The pooling of joint efforts seems to be more difficult if there is no feeling of connection, no community.

Creating positive imaginaries is important, because “Imaginaries about a place influence policy outcomes through their repeated performance … the discourse underlying imaginaries do political work and become a lens through which we see the world and make decisions” (Tozer and Klenk 2018, 174).

So it seems worth the effort that ideas about a better future should be available to the individual, as individual choices have great impact on nearly everything: the goal should be to have a shared vision, that includes “normal” people. And it should be a positive vision. We know enough about the power of the mind to work with the strong effects it can create. Tozer and Klenk (2018) talk about the importance or benefit of having diverse sociotechnical imaginaries, as they will reach different outcomes that may inspire other projects or communities or help them – I feel like at least one of those should be happening in the sphere of “normal” people, not on government level, city-planning and architectural environments. I can only speak about living in Germany where, as yet, far too little is happening.

References

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2015. “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity.” In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, edited by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1-33. https://dx.doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001.

Tozer, Laura, and Nicole Klenk. 2018. “Discourses of Carbon Neutrality and Imaginaries of Urban Futures.” Energy Research & Social Science 35: 174-181.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2017.10.017.

This article is part of the graduate seminar series Urban Ecologies 2020.