Description
The question guiding our work is: how can sociotechnical imaginaries promote political positions of hegemonic resistance and contestation in Latin America? We understand the future not only as the domain of the will but also as the domain of power, from the understanding that it encompasses a variety of actors and visions of the future, that may represent points of conflict or dialogue. Imaginaries of the future are political since knowledge and politics of anticipation and preparation for the future are intimately connected; that is, thinking about the future disturbs and mobilizes action in the present. However, these imaginaries do not only refer to anticipations about how the future could be; they inscribe normative visions of actors about how the future should be. Therefore, such knowledge and visions modulate perceptions regarding desirable and achievable futures. By sustaining different epistemological foundations and marginalizing alternative visions as undesirable and unattainable, these visions can cause political clashes. Under this reading, imaginaries represent a means of politicizing the future. Given the crises produced by the cosmovision of technology as an exclusively productive force and capitalist mechanism, it is necessary to contemplate the existence of alternative technological futures under different cosmotechnical conceptions. In response to modernity's systematic destruction of futures, it is necessary to adopt “futurization” – envisioning multiple futures in the future – as an urgent strategy to resist the witchcraft of progress and the poverty of the monoculture of imaginaries.
