The venue of the 13^th Annual Winter School on Emerging Technologies, organized by the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University (ASU), was Saguaro Lake Ranch northeast of Phoenix. The existence of this ranch can be traced back to the construction of the Stewart Mountain Dam in the late 1920s – one of several large infrastructural projects that transformed the desert Southwest by regulating water flows and generating electricity. These technologies helped make large parts of Arizona inhabitable and enabled the state’s rapid economic expansion during the 20^th century. Today, however, these infrastructures and their services are increasingly under pressure due to the growth of resource-intensive industries such as data centers, alongside the region’s intensifying water crisis. Against this backdrop, the Winter School’s central question became particularly salient: What role should science and technology play in times of ecological, political, and societal crisis – and what does ‘impactful scholarship’ mean under such conditions?

The 2026 Winter School brought together early career researchers from across the US, alongside participants from Japan, Australia, and Europe. Over the course of a week, the rich program combined discussions on emerging technologies, societal responsibility, and public engagement with informal exchanges among scholars working at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and technology assessment (TA). While ‘impact’ often serves as shorthand for measurable outcomes, publication metrics, or policy influence, the Winter School framed it more broadly: as a question of how research intervenes in public life and how scholars position themselves in relation to ongoing sociotechnical transformations.

A particularly memorable session on the “Social Contract for Science” brought together STS scholars David Guston and Heather Douglas, who reflected on the responsibilities of science amid political polarization and declining trust in expertise, as well as in institutionalized forms of science and technology policy. One phrase from our collective discussion has stayed with us along the week: “The least we can do thinking about the social contract of science is ‘don’t make the world worse’.” To me, this seemingly self-explanatory statement captured a remarkable combination of humility and urgency. Rather than presenting science as a straightforward driver of progress, the discussion emphasized uncertainty, shifting responsibilities, and possible pushbacks against increasingly technocratic forms of solutionism.

This perspective resonated throughout the Winter School. Many conversations moved beyond conceptualizing innovation, rather focusing on accountability, trust, and inclusive forms of democratic engagement. The atmosphere was notably intervention-oriented: societal relevance, community collaboration, and public engagement were treated not as secondary dimensions of research, but as central components of scholarly practice itself.

This orientation was also visible in a workshop led by Ruth Wylie and Ed Finn from ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. The session invited us to engage with “thoughtful optimism” and to reconsider the role of imagination in addressing contemporary grand challenges. Rather than promoting naïve optimism, the workshop created space to ask how deliberately hopeful narratives might help make alternative technopolitical futures both imaginable and actionable.

Another compelling session was “Where should we put nuclear waste (and other hard conversations)?”, led by Nich Weller. The presentation outlined the ambitious yet precariously funded participatory TA efforts in the US, focusing on the sociopolitical frictions surrounding nuclear waste governance. It highlighted the difficulty of creating legitimate and democratic decision-making processes around controversial technologies and their residues. Questions of long-term responsibility, environmental justice, public trust, and Indigenous sovereignty played a central role. Equally important were discussions about land ownership, appropriate compensation, and what actually constitutes an ‘informed’ decision by affected communities – not only in the present, but also with regard to future generations. These questions carry particular significance in Arizona and the broader US Southwest, given the history of marginalization of indigenous and local communities in the region.

These themes continued beyond the Winter School itself. On my final day in the Phoenix area, Nich Weller and Clark Miller invited me to attend the stakeholder event “Nuclear Waste Forms & Futures: Insights and Imagination”, organized within the framework of the 3C-AZ project.

Funded by the US Department of Energy during the Biden administration, the 3C-AZ project seeks to develop collaborative and participatory approaches to decision-making around controversial infrastructures and technological futures. While the project focuses on future nuclear waste storage and consent-based siting, its broader aim is to create community engagement tools for difficult long-term decisions more generally. Importantly, the project does not advocate Arizona as a storage site for nuclear waste – indeed, as I was told during the event, this would not be feasible due to geological conditions. Rather, Arizona and its complex sociopolitical landscape serve as a context for exploring how communities can be involved earlier and more meaningfully in sociotechnical decision-making processes. Through public and collaborative forums, as well as speculative storytelling, 3C-AZ investigates not only what forms of participation ‘work’ but also how communities can shape these practices according to their own needs and priorities.

The public event also featured the presentation of the accompanying book project Our Radioactive Neighbors: Collaborative Imagination, Community Futures, and Nuclear Siting Practices, edited by Clark A. Miller, Ruth Wylie, and Joey Eschrich. Enriching the 3C-AZ project’s approaches through speculative fiction and interdisciplinary reflection, the book asks what it would mean – in everyday life and across decades or centuries – to live alongside nuclear waste infrastructure. Rather than reducing siting debates to technical or administrative questions, the book foregrounds the social, cultural, and imaginative dimensions of long-term technological futures. It combines perspectives on nuclear waste governance, geology, public policy, and energy systems with Indigenous reflections on justice, stewardship, and relationships to land.

From a TA perspective, the underlying argument of both the 3C-AZ project and Our Radioactive Neighbors is especially noteworthy: Communities confronted with difficult long-term decisions require not only technical information but also “robust, collaborative visions of the future”. In this way, imagination is not an escape from rational deliberation, but serves as a democratic resource. Through its and collaborative storytelling and visual art, the project expands familiar TA discussions about participation into the realm of narrative and imaginative practices.

How might deliberately hopeful narratives help make alternative futures concerning the impact of technology assessment both imaginable and actionable?

Striking to me was the project’s explicit engagement with Indigenous perspectives. Discussions repeatedly emphasized that nuclear infrastructures cannot be separated from histories of settler colonialism, land dispossession, and unequal distributions of technological risk. At the same time, the project demonstrated how US-based participatory TA – despite the aforementioned increasingly difficult funding conditions – can incorporate experimental and creative methods that move beyond conventional stakeholder consultation.

For non-US TA audiences, these insights serve as important food-for-thought. The Winter School and the 3C-AZ project suggested a version of impactful TA scholarship less narrowly focused on condensed policy advice and more concerned with facilitating collective reflection capacities in relation to technological futures through speculative, participatory, and narrative practices.

At the same time, the emphasis on ‘impact’ remains ambivalent. Calls for societal relevance can easily turn into vague normative expectations, especially in academic systems shaped by funding pressures and demands for measurable outcomes. Personally, the experiences I’ve made in the US reinforced my perception of the importance of critically scrutinizing notions of impact as well as their respective implications – both within the TA community and in relation to external expectations. Perhaps this is precisely what the TA community must collectively engage in imaginatively: Asking how deliberately hopeful narratives might help make alternative futures concerning the impact of TA both imaginable and actionable. In times of ecological crisis, political uncertainty, and contested sociotechnical transitions, the question most certainly is no longer whether scholarship should have societal impact, but rather what kinds of impact should be strived for – and how we can pursue these responsibly and sustainably. In this sense, the Winter School’s most modest formulation may also have been its most convincing one: At the very least, scholarship in TA and beyond should try not to make the world worse.