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                Call for Articles:

Special Issue of the journal Digital Culture & Society

http://digicults.org/

Towards Popular Techno-Futures - a Global Cultural Perspective

Submission deadlines for abstracts (200-300 words): March 15

and full papers (6000-8000 words): August 15, 2025

Please submit all contributions to: techfutures@posteo.com


This special issue will bring together articles exploring Popular 
Techno-Futures from interdisciplinary and international perspectives, 
i*ncluding Cultural and Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies 
and related disciplines.*


The goal of this special issue is to decenter the discussion on 
socio-technical futures and the role of popular culture, aesthetics and 
media in their (re)production. In the Global North, official policies 
and cultural engagements with techno-futures are predominantly driven by 
a small group of libertarian techno-oligarchs who, in spite of 
reinforcing critical and dystopian counter-discourses, propound 
celebratory views of technological progress - of enhancing, or 
overcoming the human - motivated by their desire to attract venture 
capital. These futures emerge as increasingly hegemonic, as governments 
tend to share these celebratory views to further their own interests of 
economic and national competitiveness. Nationalist, elitist, and often 
ethnocentric imaginaries and narratives blur the line between political, 
economic, and pop-cultural realms and become obstacles to a nuanced and 
inclusive discourse on the risks and benefits of future technologies. 
What is worse, the political surrender to capitalist and competitive 
growth-lock-ins disregards or even erases a vast imaginary zone of 
alternative futures.

Focused on the interests of individual nations, these narratives tend to 
disregard the historical and current economic entanglements between 
technological developments in the North and the exploitation of the 
South. Political and cultural media discourses in the North tend to cast 
the Global South as war-torn, technologically underdeveloped, and in 
need of help. At the same time, official national strategies in the 
Global North as well as the Global South foreground the use of 
technology to further development and economic growth. These efforts 
tend to disregard the economic precarity of local populations and the 
necropolitical exploitation of the lands of the South. Rarely 
acknowledged in official media discourses and dominant cultural 
references, these connections nevertheless emerge in counter-cultural 
discourses and artistic productions predominantly from the Global South 
which imagine their own techno-futures. Preexisting research on 
techno-futures and their impact on the societal acceptance, design, and 
use of technologies has mostly focused on the ‘key players’ of the West 
(and its antagonism to China), while other parts of the world have been 
neglected.


Conceptually, Cultural Studies and STS scholarship have long stressed 
the interplay between the social imagination and the de facto production 
of scientific facts or socio-technical authority. Contributions will 
work from the general premise that technologies are shaped not only by 
the policies and views of political or economic elites and the 
allocation of resources but also by various narratives and discourses 
drawing on popular imaginaries and cultural frameworks of 
techno-futures. Technology, and therefore also technological futures, 
are always socially situated, relational, and enmeshed in (dominant) 
narratives of societal sense-making, constantly reworked and understood 
differently by users and contexts. Narratives, in particular, have not 
only been understood as reservoirs of sense-making, but also as 
performative trajectories, causing dominant perceptions, expectations 
and investments - powerfully transforming future ideas into material being.

While the intersecting fields of cultural studies and STS have begun to 
acknowledge voices from the Global South, there is still more work to be 
done to arrive at a more just and inclusive picture. Such a global take 
on tech-futures has taken on a renewed urgency in times of rising 
geopolitical block formations, growing tensions, and a worrying 
resparking of nationalist sentiments. In this special issue, we plan to 
focus on forms of tech-future societal discourses from a global and 
popular perspective to counter the dominant Western mode of inquiry and 
its (de-)construction of tech-futures. Eligible articles should thus 
tackle (one or more of) the following questions:

  *

    How do different forms of sense-making, like belief systems, media,
    cultural memory, myths, political culture, and social ideals around
    the globe reflect, shape, and produce their own tech-futures?

  *

    How are these futures co-produced through local and regional
    experiences, histories and narratives, and how do such narratives
    interweave traditional and futuristic discourses to create
    culturally specific futurisms (Sinofuturism, Afrofuturism,
    Indigenous Futurisms)?

  *

    What role do the denial or promotion of, opposition or attraction
    to, and resistance against or adoption of Western modernist and
    techno-progressive paradigms play?

  *

    How do tensions between spheres of global or local, official or
    informal shape artistic and media explorations of techno-futures?

  *

    What kind of cultural productions and media embody and represent
    tech-futures? What is the role of the arts, stories, markets,
    ideals, figures, imagery, humor, narrativity etc. in transmitting
    and producing different techno futures?

  *

    What kind of different hermeneutical approaches and tools exist in
    contribution or opposition to creating typologies, comparisons,
    discourses, symbols, analysis etc.?

  *

    Which transnational patterns and connections and block formations
    can be identified in their development?

When submitting an abstract, authors should make explicit to which of 
the following categories they would like to submit their paper:

Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We invite articles that discuss empirical findings from studies that 
approach the relationships between neurobiology, brain research, 
computational intelligence, biopolitics, psychological research and the 
new AI movement. These may include practices of circulating or 
collecting data as well processes of production and evaluation.

Methodological Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We invite contributions that reflect on the methodologies employed when 
researching the practices of the new tendencies of AI (e.g. artificial 
neural networks, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, evolutionary 
computation, deep learning, prognostics and predictive modelling, 
computer vision). These may include, for example, the specificities of 
ethnographic fieldwork in online/offline environments; challenges and 
opportunities faced when qualitatively researching quantifiable data and 
vice versa; approaches using mixed methods; discussions of mobile and 
circulative methods; and reflections of experimental forms of research.

Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We encourage contributions that reflect on the conceptual and/or 
theoretical dimension of the new artificial intelligence paradigm, and 
discuss or question how digital intelligence can be defined, what it can 
describe, and how it can be differentiated.

Entering the Field (2000-3000 words; experimental formats welcome)


Publication schedule

March 15: Collection of abstracts

August 15: Collection of full papers

September onwards: Peer-review

Early 2026: Publication of the Special Issue

*Please submit your abstract of 200-300 words until March 15, 2025 to 
the following email address:*

techfutures@posteo.com

Publication fees

None. The issue will be made fully open access one year after initial 
publication.

We strongly encourage researchers and practitioners around the world 
(especially the ones outside, or countering, the scientific production 
of the global North) to submit an abstract.

*Please circulate widely.*

Guest editors:

Jascha Bareis

Scientific Staff at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems 
Analysis (ITAS) & Associate researcher at the Humboldt Institute for 
Internet and Society (HIIG)


Anya Heise-von der Lippe

Assistant Lecturer with the Chair of Anglophone Literatures at the 
English Department of the University of Tübingen

Felix Spremberg

Postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Languages and 
Cultures, Ghent University



-- 

*Jascha Bareis*(Profile) 
(Scholar) 
(LinkedIn) 


Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis(ITAS) 


Karlsruher Institute of Technology(KIT) 


Research Group Digital Technology and Societal Change(FG DigIT) 



*Recent Publications*

Ask Me Anything ! 😈How ChatPGT Got Hyped Into Being.SOC ARXIV Preprint 


The Trustification of AI. Disclosing the bridging pillars that tie Trust 
and AI together.Big Data & Society 


Technology Hype: Dealing with bold expectations and overpromising, with 
M. Roßmann and F.Bordignon.Journal of Technology Assessment in Theory 
and Practice 
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