China, Technology, Planetary Futures: Lessons for a World in Crisis?

Abstract

Two issues are set to become increasingly central in coming decades. First and foremost, amidst the Anthropocene, are issues of environmental crisis at planetary scale, and what this means for a global economy and associated model of science and innovation premised upon ever-accelerating exploitation of natural resources. Secondly, and in comparison a highly neglected issue in mainstream (still largely Western) social science, is the rise of China. But how these two issues will come together and shape the 21st century receives even less attention, even as their conjunction is likely to prove increasingly influential. This is both an increasingly problematic oversight and a missed opportunity for insights that do not merely confirm relatively established, i.e. Euro-Atlanticist and short-termist, readings of the state of the ‘world’. STS has much to contribute to the development of this missing analysis, not just because the construction of new environmental, infrastructural and technological (and, in particular, digital) innovations from and in China is already evident as a key dynamic. But also because of STS’s capacity to draw on empirical exploration that does not take theoretical categories as given but pursues development of new illuminating concepts adequate to a constantly changing socio-technical landscape of uncertain futures. This panel thus invites contributions studying Chinese socio-technical projects (in China or overseas, e.g. via the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)) for insights into how these two ‘mega-trends’ may be coming together; and what may be learned from China, positively or negatively, to confront the current apparent impasse(s) regarding global crisis.