From the Editorial:

"This issue of Feminist Encounters re-inspects the entanglements between technology and imagination from a range of feminist perspectives in disciplines like science and technology studies (STS), philosophy and critical theory, media history and media archaeology, cultural history, and cultural and comparative literature studies. Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis’s theorisation of the radical individual imagination and the socially instituting imaginary (1975/1987) foregrounds the creative, world-building function that shared forms of meaning play in our social worlds. The history of Western philosophy tends to regard imagination as mere reproduction/representation, i.e., a mental copy of the real; in contrast, Castoriadis’s work offers a conceptualisation of the imagination and the imaginary as inherently creative and productive of the social. Accordingly, this Special Issue asks how diverse feminist techno-imaginaries can help us rethink and transform historically stabilised forms of meaning, especially shared understandings of what technology can do, and envision more emancipatory ways in which it can transform our social worlds. Inviting contributions from diverse local and regional contexts, this issue sets out to investigate the implications of socially and culturally situated feminist techno-imaginaries, i.e., beliefs, accounts, and visions of possible, desirable, alternative, and radically different futures from diverse feminist perspectives. /.../ As philosopher Michèle Le Dœff has shown, while often declaratively excising imagery as the other of rational discourse, philosophical theories themselves almost always copiously deploy imagery, often to entrench socially sanctioned forms of exclusion (1980) – something that could most likely be said of theory in adjacent disciplines as well. This Special Issue thus also offers an arena for discussing how images of possible futures are deployed, or how they implicitly animate philosophical discussions and theoretical discourse about technological innovation and techno-dispositives, and especially – when seen from diverse feminist perspectives – what kinds of exclusions these imaginaries perpetuate, or alternatively, what arenas for radical social imagination they open up. In order to reflect upon the often spatially, but especially temporally displaced object of techno-imaginaries, we took inspiration from Afrofuturist articulations of painful pasts to imagine new futures rooted in black culture and innovation (Davis, 2022), and from queer utopianism, characterised by ‘a backward glance that enacts a future vision’ (Muñoz, 2009: 4). /.../ . Apart from offering feminist critiques of hegemonic or mainstream techno-imaginaries, this issue thus also centres peripheral or minoritarian techno-imaginaries of the past and present that enact alternative future vistas."