Call for Abstracts for 4S Toronto 2026, Open Panel #197: Science, Technology, and Fiction (due April 30, 2026)

[Dan Santos]

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to invite abstracts for our Open Panel at 4S Toronto 2026: “Science, Technology, and Fiction: Questioning Novelty and Power” (#197).

This year 4S celebrates its 50th anniversary with the theme “TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures,” exploring how technoscience and innovation intersect with power and shape possible futures.

Our session explores how fictional narratives (film, TV, novels, comics, videogames, etc.) not only represent technoscientific developments, but also shape what appears possible, legitimate, risky, or desirable. We are especially interested in two themes:

1. Novelty: How is “the new” (innovations, institutions, imaginaries) represented in fictional worlds? What is framed as continuity and with what is known, and what as rupture?
2. Power and inequality: How is novelty defined and mobilized through relations of power (class, race/ethnicity, gender, disability, coloniality, ecological violence, etc.)? Which futures are naturalized, and which are kept out of view?

We also welcome contributions that bring into conversation “external” outlooks (e.g. how fiction intersects with policy, public debate, societal expectations, commercial developments, and activism) with “internal” ones (e.g. how practices, infrastructures, bodies, environments, evidence, risk, innovation, and responsibility are represented within the narrative world itself).

Examples of relevant topics could include (indicative, not exhaustive):

• Technoscientific imaginaries and futures (utopias/dystopias, counterfutures, alternative modernities)

• Representations of technoscientific practice (expertise, institutions, infrastructures, bodies, environments) across media
• Circulation and uses of scientific knowledge/innovation (education, public engagement, policy metaphors, corporate storytelling, fandoms)

The Call for Abstracts closes April 30, 2026, and can be submitted here. The conference is primarily in person, with a hybrid option to support online participation.

If you are working on fiction, science fiction, or technofutures, or on how cultural narratives reconfigure technoscientific novelty and power, we’d be very happy to hear about your work for our session. And if you have any questions about fit, please feel free to email us!

Best wishes,

Dan Santos (Australian National University; dan.s...@anu.edu.au)

Elena Denia (University of Valencia; elena...@uv.es)

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Dan Santos, PhD

Research Fellow

UNESCO Chair in Science Communication for the Public Good

Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science

The Australian National University

42a Linnaeus Way, Acton ACT 2601