Developing a novel approach to participatory technology assessment through science fiction in the case of climate geoengineering

This PhD project aims to develop a new approach to participatory technology assessment through science fiction in the case of climate geoengineering.
Prospective technologies such as climate geoengineering - i.e. 'large scale interventions in the Earth's climate system' including carbon removal and solar radiation management - pose multiple un-intended implications to the environment and society. Work in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technologies Studies (STS) has continuously stressed the need to advance further in attending to the social futures that come forward with climate geoengineering technologies via incorporating alternative, creative, and artistic imagination of these new scientific advances in assessment practice. However, existing attempts to engage publics and wider society in participatory technology assessment processes have mainly been formal invited exercises of participation facilitated by experts and framed within the scientific imagination of climate geoengineering.
This project seeks to open up and diversify technology assessment practice by bringing together work on participatory technology assessment and sociotechnical imaginaries with climate geoengineering science fiction for the first time. It will do this via a systematic mapping of diverse instances of climate geoengineering science fiction and public engagements with them occurring in the UK since 2006 (when the term 'geoengineering' was formalised in scientific literature); analysis of the imagined geoengineered futures evident within these science fiction climate geoengineering engagements; and the development of a participation experiment through which it will test and evaluate a new science fiction-based approach to participatory technology assessment. These methods will be used in turn to answer the following research questions:
1) What is the nature of diverse forms of public engagement with science fiction on climate geoengineering occurring in the UK?
2) What kinds of sociotechnical futures are being imagined in these public engagements with climate geoengineering science fiction?
3) How can these science fiction-based visions and public engagements be used to open up participatory technology assessments of climate geoengineering?
Being a focal point for participatory technology assessments in the UK, climate geoengineering is projected to play a major role in mitigating climate change following the recent COP26. This PhD therefore offers empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions with regard to the way climate geoengineering technologies are being developed, via articulating the importance of artistic forms of public engagement in future-making and the production of new insights on the social dimensions of climate geoengineered futures. Additionally, through greater accountability of diverse public views on climate geoengineering in science fiction, this project will bring forward new concerns and possibilities regarding climate geoengineering that might not have yet formed, but which will be significant to academic and policy initiatives such as the UKERC Public Engagement Observatory, and the UK's Greenhouse Gas Removal demonstration programme.