There is a dimension of the relationships we establish with Science and Technology that, in my view, often escapes approaches primarily centered on the acquisition of knowledge. We may understand certain concepts, recognize equipment, comprehend procedures, or know, to some extent, how scientific evidence is produced and still remain within a relatively narrow universe regarding the places we assign to science in our culture, the people we recognize as its agents, and the forms of life we are able to imagine in relation to it. This question interests me because it seems to precede many choices that, retrospectively, we tend to organize under the rubric of individual choice. For a profession, an academic trajectory, or a particular way of being in the world to be effectively considered by someone, that possibility would first need to acquire a certain degree of cultural intelligibility.
The problem began to gain greater clarity for me through a study I supervised involving high school students at a public school in Belford Roxo. When speaking about Science and Technology, those students articulated something more complex than school-based definitions or disciplinary classifications. What emerged were particular ways of organizing the world, attributions of prestige to certain forms of knowledge, and different degrees of plausibility assigned to the professional trajectories they recognized around them. Some professions appeared almost immediately familiar when associated with the technoscientific universe; others remained more distant, even though their practice depended heavily on scientific knowledge, technical devices, or technological systems. What was at stake, therefore, seemed to exceed the ability to classify an occupation correctly. There was, rather, a problem of cultural legibility and, consequently, a question concerning the limits within which certain future possibilities could be imagined.
It is at this point that I have been using the expression technoscientific imaginaries. I am less interested in transforming it into a rigid category, sufficiently closed to accommodate what subjects say and do, than in using it as a possible way of reading the cultural configurations surrounding what we recognize as Science and Technology. Science does not reach us devoid of history. It circulates accompanied by images, expectations, narratives, characters, institutions, and forms of authority sedimented over time. Technology, in a similar manner, carries promises of progress, fears of obsolescence, images of intelligence, professional expectations, and conceptions of what it might mean to be prepared for a future repeatedly presented as technological.
In this sense, a productive connection can be established with the discussion developed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim in Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. By working with the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries, the authors draw attention to collectively produced ways of imagining desirable futures through Science and Technology, relating such visions to projects of social order, power, and collective life. The connection is productive, although I do not intend to treat “technoscientific imaginaries” and “sociotechnical imaginaries” as interchangeable expressions. My interest lies at a different scale of observation. I am particularly concerned with the processes of signification through which concrete subjects recognize, translate, and reorganize signs associated with Science and Technology when producing narratives about themselves, professions, and possible futures.
This distinction seems necessary because it prevents the concept from preceding the empirical material too decisively. There is always a classificatory seduction in theory, particularly when we encounter a category capable of elegantly organizing what we observe. Yet the elegance of an explanation may exact a high price when the corpus begins to serve merely as an illustration of a structure already decided in advance. I prefer, in this sense, to treat concepts as instruments of approximation, allowing them to establish a dialogue with the material without requiring students to behave as exemplary instances of a theory.
It is precisely here that the Semiotics of Culture offers, for the reading I am proposing, a particularly productive field. In Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, Yuri Lotman develops a conception of culture as a heterogeneous semiotic space, marked by different languages, boundaries, translation processes, and zones of greater or lesser stability. The notion of semiosphere allows us to understand that no sign produces meaning in isolation. Its intelligibility depends on the relations it establishes with other signs, codes, texts, and systems of signification. Science and Technology, observed from this perspective, cease to function merely as names for fields of knowledge and also become relevant as cultural signs, inscribed within networks that assign certain meanings to them while constraining others.
The question of the boundary, so important in Lotman, acquires particular relevance here. The semiotic boundary does not operate merely as a division; it functions as a space of translation. What arrives from another system must be reorganized in order to become intelligible. This operation helps us understand why the same sign may assume quite different functions when it crosses distinct cultural contexts. “Scientist,” “technology,” “university,” “engineering,” “research,” or even “future” do not carry stable meanings that students would simply receive. These signs encounter memories, school experiences, family relations, media products, socioeconomic conditions, expectations of recognition, and numerous other textualities that interfere with the ways in which they are understood.
This perspective also leads me to distrust overly comfortable separations between what would come “from school” and what would come “from the media.” Such a distinction may be methodologically useful under certain circumstances, yet it only imperfectly describes concrete cultural experience. A video watched on a mobile phone may reactivate vocabulary previously learned in the classroom; a school explanation may acquire meaning through images whose grammar has been assimilated through cinema, television, or digital media; a family conversation about professions may reorganize expectations previously associated with some media content. Culture does not seem to respect the analytical boundaries we construct in order to study it. Meanings cross those boundaries, undergo translations, encounter resistances, and return under new configurations.
For this reason, the prominent presence of audiovisual materials and digital media in those students’ everyday lives deserves to be considered with caution, particularly so that their recurrence is not hastily taken as a causal explanation. The corpus allows us to recognize regularities, examine appropriations, and trace relationships among different elements; it does not authorize us to claim that a particular image would mechanically produce a particular conception. Between circulation and appropriation, there is semiotic work. What reaches the subject encounters previous experiences, values, memories, expectations, and zones of resistance, and may therefore be incorporated, distorted, rejected, resignified, or remain relatively available until another context assigns it a different function.
This caution becomes particularly important when we observe that, in speaking about Science and Technology, students were also speaking about professions and, in doing so, producing small narratives about the future. This connection gradually came to seem less and less secondary to me. A profession can only become part of someone’s horizon in a relatively concrete manner when there is a repertoire capable of sustaining its presence within that possible universe. It is necessary to recognize the activity, to assign it some form of concrete existence, to understand, even partially, the spaces in which it takes place, and to imagine some path capable of articulating the present with that future possibility.
There is, in this sense, an important difference between abstractly desiring a profession and possessing sufficient cultural references to narrate a path that might lead to it. The future requires mediations. It needs to be populated by recognizable institutions, people who may function as references, intelligible languages, and some knowledge of the stages that structure a trajectory. When such relations cannot be established, a possibility may objectively exist and yet remain culturally almost invisible to a particular subject.
It is precisely at this point that Arjun Appadurai’s discussion in The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition offers a point of dialogue that I consider especially fertile. By treating aspiration as a cultural capacity and associating it with a kind of navigational competence, Appadurai moves the discussion of the future beyond categories such as will, desire, or merit. To aspire also involves knowing paths, establishing relations between stages, recognizing institutions, identifying possibilities, and possessing sufficient references to imagine the movements required between a present condition and a future one.
The metaphor of navigation is particularly interesting for the problem I am proposing. Navigation presupposes some kind of map, however incomplete; it presupposes the ability to recognize signs, orient oneself among alternatives, and recalculate routes when one path ceases to be possible. Subjects, however, do not receive the same cultural maps, nor do they have the same opportunities to learn how to use them. It is precisely for this reason that inequality may also be considered in relation to the conditions through which certain futures become more or less narratable. I am not referring here to the replacement of material conditions by a cultural explanation. Income, mobility, access to education, territory, support networks, and other concrete conditions continue to decisively delimit what may or may not be realized. The issue lies in perceiving how these material conditions are traversed by systems of signification that make particular possibilities recognizable, distant, desirable, improbable, or even unformulable.
The discussion developed by Louise Archer, Emily Dawson, Jennifer DeWitt, Amy Seakins, and Billy Wong around science capital adds another layer to this problem. In “Science Capital: A Conceptual, Methodological, and Empirical Argument for Extending Bourdieusian Notions of Capital Beyond the Arts,” the authors seek to understand how forms of cultural and social capital related to science are unequally distributed and associated with the ways young people recognize science, relate to it, and imagine future trajectories. The concept has a Bourdieusian matrix and therefore does not coincide with the semiotic-cultural reading I am developing. Nevertheless, the dialogue seems particularly productive precisely because it draws attention to something also suggested by the Belford Roxo corpus: knowing science, knowing people connected to science, having contact with certain repertoires, and perceiving oneself, or being perceived, as someone for whom science constitutes a possible territory are dimensions that do not necessarily unfold together.
This issue allows the problem to become more complex. A student may possess relatively consistent scientific knowledge and still fail to recognize a scientific career as a plausible horizon for themselves. They may consume media products intensely associated with technology without identifying the network of professions that supports their production. They may attribute high social prestige to science while simultaneously perceiving it as an activity performed by a category of people to which they do not belong. In such situations, the problem could hardly be reduced to an information deficit. What emerges is a configuration of relations among knowledge, recognition, belonging, material conditions, and possibilities for projecting the future.
For this reason, I have been thinking of the life project as a form of prospective cultural text. The formulation interests me because it displaces the notion of project from an exclusively psychological sphere, allowing it to be observed within the terrain of signification. The future narrated by a subject is elaborated with the symbolic materials available to them, and these materials are, in turn, traversed by the concrete conditions of their existence. I do not conceive of this text as a completed script or a previously established sequence. A prospective text admits gaps, hesitations, erasures, contradictions, and rewritings. It may accommodate elements that are still poorly articulated, images that have not yet found a definite place, and possibilities that remain suspended before acquiring some degree of stability.
Returning to Lotman, we might also understand this process in terms of modeling. Culture offers systems through which the world acquires organization and predictability, allowing some connections to become more readily recognizable while others remain scarcely visible. Modeling does not mechanically determine behavior. It organizes possible ways of reading. A professional horizon, seen from this angle, does not correspond merely to a choice situated in the future; it begins to be produced much earlier, within the relations through which certain social positions, institutions, activities, and trajectories acquire meaning.
This formulation helps explain why I consider it insufficient to treat imaginaries as a collection of images subsequently added to a reality that is already constituted. What appears natural, distant, prestigious, dangerous, accessible, or improbable reaches the subject marked by previous cultural processes. Technoscientific imaginaries concern precisely these forms of organization through which Science and Technology become culturally legible and establish relations with conceptions of work, intelligence, success, mobility, future, and recognition.
This understanding also makes it possible, with due caution, to bring my formulation closer to Jasanoff and Kim’s discussion of sociotechnical imaginaries. In Dreamscapes of Modernity, Science and Technology appear connected to collective visions of desirable futures and conceptions of social order. In the material I analyze, my interest lies in observing something situated at a different scale: how fragments of these broader cultural narratives may be translated, reorganized, or rejected when young people attempt to narrate their own horizons. There may be a relation between these levels, but it would be premature to presume a direct correspondence. The socially stabilized imaginary does not descend intact upon the individual. It crosses boundaries, encounters other textualities, and may assume unexpected functions.
It is precisely this interrelation that guides the investigation I am currently developing from the corpus produced in 2024. Returning to the same data does not mean repeating the dissertation using different vocabulary. The corpus is now being interrogated through another question: in what ways do culturally articulated meanings surrounding Science and Technology model the professional and existential horizons formulated by students?
The question also entails a methodological shift. A response formulated before a particular activity and another produced afterward should not, without further mediation, be taken as evidence that the intervention “changed” the student. Between one formulation and another, a process of meaning production occurred and needs to be reconstructed. An example may have made possible a translation that was previously unavailable; a question may have reorganized a particular classificatory boundary; a collective conversation may have created new relations among already familiar signs. The analytical interest, in this sense, lies less in establishing that change occurred than in attempting to understand the semiotic conditions that made a particular reconfiguration possible.
There is also a methodological reason to insist on this caution. We are working with a corpus composed of 26 students from a single school, produced under specific conditions of interaction. The collective interviews include overlaps, reciprocal influences, hesitations, agreements, silences, and different forms of mediation. These elements do not constitute noise external to the material; they are part of the very cultural situation we are seeking to understand. To transform these statements into a representation of “Brazilian youth” would mean abandoning precisely what I consider most productive in the corpus: the possibility of examining, on a situated scale, how particular processes of signification take place concretely.
Another problem then begins to acquire relevance. Contemporary discourses recurrently present the future as associated with permanent updating, adaptability, technological competence, and continuous self-investment. Science and Technology may enter this grammar when they are signified as promises of mobility, security, or privileged access to a future perceived as increasingly dependent on technical competence. This issue could be brought into dialogue with discussions concerning neoliberal rationality and contemporary forms of subjectivation.
For the moment, however, I prefer to keep this relation within the field of interpretative hypothesis. It needs to emerge from sustained engagement with the corpus, avoiding a situation in which a previously chosen theory begins to organize what students may or may not say. It is important to preserve precisely those moments in which the narrative hesitates, interrupts itself, contradicts itself, or follows unexpected paths. These zones of instability prevent analysis from operating as a classificatory machine and may, perhaps, reveal more clearly the living character of cultural processes.
In this context, the very idea of “broadening horizons” requires caution. The expression may easily acquire an uplifting tone, as though offering new professional images were sufficient to make previously improbable trajectories available. I do not believe the problem can be formulated in those terms. A culturally imaginable possibility remains subject to the material conditions that affect its realization. Yet the inverse movement also deserves attention: the objective existence of an opportunity does not guarantee that it will be recognized as a possibility by every subject. Between social existence and cultural recognition there is an interval that educational research does not always examine with the attention it deserves.
Perhaps it is precisely within this interval that the concept of technoscientific imaginaries may offer some contribution. It allows us to observe Science and Technology at a moment prior to that in which they appear organized as school content or assume the form of apparently consolidated professional decisions. It allows us to interrogate them as signs that traverse the cultural organization of experience and, through this process, affect what a particular subject is able to recognize as possible, improbable, desirable, or distant for themselves.
Scientific culture thus acquires a broader scope than the idea of information transmission can accommodate. It also involves forms of reading through which we recognize science in places where its presence is not immediately evident, understand relations between scientific knowledge and social practices, identify agents, institutions, and processes, and interrogate narratives that associate technology with particular images of the future. The more restricted this repertoire of relations, the smaller the number of paths that tend to be culturally recognizable. Expanding this repertoire does not eliminate material obstacles, nor does it determine future choices; it may, however, reorganize the symbolic field within which a choice begins to acquire form.
I return, therefore, to the initial point. Growing interest in the ways young people relate to Science and Technology should not lead us only to ask what they know. It would also be necessary to ask which worlds become legible through that knowledge, which trajectories can be narrated, which figures emerge as possible references, and which zones remain outside the field of recognition. By making this movement, we may perhaps understand more precisely that the relation between scientific culture and the future is not established only at the moment of professional choice. It is being produced long before that, in the everyday processes through which certain paths acquire names, images, meanings, and some possibility of existence.
Finally, there is something in this discussion that seems to require an even closer relationship with philosophy. When we ask how Science and Technology model futures, we inevitably encounter questions that exceed the instrumental dimension of science education. We are asking which subjects can be imagined, which forms of life acquire legitimacy, which conceptions of progress organize our desires, and which images of the future we learn to consider desirable. There are, therefore, epistemological, ontological, hermeneutic, and axiological dimensions running through the problem.
In this sense, investigating technoscientific imaginaries also means turning the question toward the cultural foundations that sustain our own conceptions of Science, Technology, and Education. The future does not simply lie ahead of us, waiting for autonomous individuals to choose among previously available paths. It begins to be signified in the present, articulating material conditions, experiences, languages, and cultural systems through which we learn to recognize paths and, equally, to perceive their absence. Perhaps it is in this still unstable space, prior to the fully formulated choice, that Science, Technology, and Education reveal one of their most interesting relations: culture does not write subjects’ futures in advance, although it provides part of the languages with which they may attempt to write them.
References
APPADURAI, Arjun. The capacity to aspire: culture and the terms of recognition. In: RAO, Vijayendra; WALTON, Michael (eds.). Culture and Public Action. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. pp. 59–84.
ARCHER, Louise; DAWSON, Emily; DEWITT, Jennifer; SEAKINS, Amy; WONG, Billy. “Science capital”: a conceptual, methodological, and empirical argument for extending Bourdieusian notions of capital beyond the arts. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 922–948, 2015. DOI: 10.1002/tea.21227.
JASANOFF, Sheila; KIM, Sang-Hyun (eds.). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
LOTMAN, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
LOTMAN, Iuri M. La semiosfera I: semiótica de la cultura y del texto. Madrid: Cátedra, 1996.
VASCONCELLOS, Danielle Pereira de. Imaginário de estudantes do ensino médio sobre os signos Ciência e Tecnologia em seus projetos de vida. 2024. Master’s dissertation (Graduate Program in Education in Sciences and Health), Instituto NUTES de Educação em Ciências e Saúde, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2024.
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