Summary
Sociotechnical imaginaries are a society’s shared visions of a desirable future, as bound up with its science and technology. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim coined the term in 2009, within science and technology studies, in a paper comparing nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. In 2015 Jasanoff redefined them as “collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions” of desirable futures.
The influence runs both ways: visions of the future steer what gets researched and built, and what gets built reshapes what people can imagine. The idea extends the older notion of social imaginaries, and now covers companies, social movements and professions as well as nations.
Rationale
Jasanoff and Kim show imagination and infrastructure making each other, much as Part 2’s ‘Told’ and ‘Built’ zones do. Theirs are public pictures of what’s to come; a deep disposition is an unspoken assumption.