Technological and ecological risks engender increasingly urgent questions both in public discourse and in academia, particularly relating to technologies associated with a potentially bright—or cataclysmically bleak, uncertain future. The conceptualization of risk and its presence in world cultures is a powerful motivating force in contemporary decision-making processes both on the personal and the global level. This means a globally interconnected discourse of risk now frames—and indeed constitutes—technological innovation in a network of ethical and social considerations, which has been identified as an “assessment regime”¹.

So far, most of the research in this field has emerged from the social sciences and the history and philosophy of science. Yet the relationship between the material realities of risk and their presence in different cultural domains importantly figures in and is impacted by literature, art, and popular culture. This requires a reconceptualization of and, more importantly, a change in the practice of interdisciplinary research.

In other words, concrete, material risks, emerging, for example, from military uses of such converging technologies (information science, cognitive science, biology, nanoscience/technology) are fundamentally interconnected with narratives about such uses in literature and popular culture in a variety of ways. Determining how these linkages can be identified, described, and interpreted productively thus calls for an interdisciplinary cooperation that brings together the expertise of the natural and social sciences, philosophy and history, as well as literary, cultural, and media studies. Though knowledge-production today is arguably to a large extent interdisciplinary, the full potential of such a change in inter- or trans-disciplinary practice has not been sufficiently explored.

This symposium takes these challenges as a starting point, inviting researchers from several core disciplines to examine possibilities of concrete, sustainable collaboration in the expanding realm of science and technology studies. It also explicitly includes BA and MA students from two research seminars that focus on these issues, whose work will be presented in a poster session. We are particularly interested in the ways in which the scientific imagination affects space, vision, and narrative in these intersecting discursive fields.

The symposium is part of a transdisciplinary research project at the University of Bayreuth, “Space - Ecology - Risk,” that explores environmental and technological risks as well as their social/cultural manifestations from a comparative perspective.