The sociology of the future is an emerging field of inquiry that works to understand future consciousness drawing from a mix of Science & Technology Studies and the practice of foresight. Through an exploration of the theories, methodologies, and quagmires of anticipation employed in the study of nanotechnology, this piece introduces the sociology of the future and suggests some ways the field is taking definition. Exploring the future tense provides a means of taking responsibility for what is to come; yet, the movement of the social sciences into the tricky terrain of the future presents tensions. Understanding plausibility, how different communities use anticipatory knowledge, and the performative role of expectations in innovation remain areas of research rich with dilemmas and delights. As social scientists begin to weave their own accounts of futures, they should pay attention to the politics of such rendering.

 Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.  You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain  You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Although nanotechnology is often defined as operations on the 10-9 meters, the lack of charisma in the scale-bound definitions has been fortified by remarkable dreams and alluring promises that spark excitement for nanotechnology. The story of the rhetorical development of nanotechnology reveals how speculative claims are powerful constructions that create legitimacy in this emerging technological domain. From its inception, nanotechnology has been more of a dream than reality, more fiction than fact. In recent years, however, the term nanotechnology has been actively drawn toward the present to begin to deliver on the fantastic expectations. This debate over time and timing is loaded with paradox. This work examines how future claims work to define what counts as nanotechnology and reveals dilemmas that accompany temporal disjunctures. Science and politics converge in debates about the future of technology as expectations serve to create and enforce power and legitimacy in the emerging area.

No abstract

Public engagement with science and technology is now widely used in science policy and communication. Touted as a means of enhancing democratic discussion of science and technology, analysis of public engagement with science and technology has shown that it is often weakly tied to scientific governance. In this article, we suggest that the notion of capacity building might be a way of reframing the democratic potential of public engagement with science and technology activities. Drawing on literatures from public policy and administration, we outline how public engagement with science and technology might build citizen capacity, before using the notion of capacity building to develop five principles for the design of public engagement with science and technology. We demonstrate the use of these principles through a discussion of the development and realization of the pilot for a large-scale public engagement with science and technology activity, the Futurescape City Tours, which was carried out in Arizona in 2012.