Resilience narratives: navigating the intersection of community epistemologies and hyper-technological futures

Both dystopian imaginaries and contemporary resilience policies reveal that the future is a contested narrative space. The key question that emerges is: whose knowledge, values and stories define what resilience means, how this is translated into resilience strategies, and which worlds are created through this translation process? What can dystopian literature teach us about understanding these dynamics?

Dystopian and speculative narratives such as Clarke’s The City and the Stars, Ballard’s The Drowned World or Riddle’s Winter World do not merely project distant futures; they function as critical mirrors of the present. They depict hyper-technological or radically transformed worlds in which survival depends on scientific research, infrastructural control or technocratic governance, often embodied in heroic experts racing to avert collapse. In doing so, they foreground a particular resilience imaginary: hyper-technological worlds take centre stage, while broader social fabrics, everyday practices and community epistemologies remain peripheral. In these futures, the capacity to cope, adapt and transform is mediated by technical structures and the institutions that control them, rather than by plural and localised forms of knowing and collective agency. Yet it is precisely through this asymmetry that dystopian literature plays a critical role: it reveals how claims of stability and progress can coexist with deep epistemic exclusion, social stratification and the silencing of alternative ways of imagining and creating the future.

This critical lens resonates strongly with contemporary practices of resilience building. This strand of dystopian literature presents imaginaries in which current dominant narratives of progress fail. Today, resilience has become a central keyword in policy and planning, used to navigate climate change, digital transformation and geopolitical uncertainty. It links past, present and future, promising sustainable transformation in the face of disruption. At the same time, it remains a deeply ambiguous and contested concept, navigating between descriptive stories of how systems persist and normative prescriptions of how societies should adapt or transform. Resilience is therefore not a neutral capacity but a narrative device: different actors define what it means and in whose interests it is pursued. These definitions are embedded in power relations and institutional path-dependencies, shaping which futures become thinkable and governable. Yet the dominant resilience narrative contrasts with perspectives that view risk as socially perceived and constructed in different ways across contexts. This latter view situates resilience within a social and policy arena where multiple narratives coexist, rather than within a single, overarching frame.

In this context, science and technology innovation do not merely mediate between present conditions and future visions; they actively define what counts as progress and, in doing so, contest and reshape its legitimacy. Through the construction of sociotechnical imaginaries—collectively held visions of desirable, technology-enabled futures—dominant expert communities and policymakers naturalise trajectories of digitalisation, automation and large-scale technologisation as both inevitable and desirable. These are translated into official roadmaps, investments and regulatory frameworks, often framed in the language of transitions, competitiveness or an emptied notion of resilience. Much like the highly engineered worlds of dystopian fiction, such imaginaries promise protection, efficiency and, often implicitly, control. They also embed a normative claim: that resilience and collective well-being are to be achieved primarily through technical optimisation and innovation-driven growth. As a result, dominant innovation narratives not only mediate but also constrain the horizon of possible futures, marginalising alternative conceptions of progress and alternative meanings of resilience within prevailing policy frameworks.

Participatory and co-creative processes operate as interfaces between community narratives and hyper-technological visions, but they function more as spaces of translation than of genuine co-production. Technical languages, quantitative indicators and pre-structured scenarios filter and reshape local concerns so that they fit dominant policy logics. Dystopian literature helps to think this gap and make it visible. By exaggerating the effects of technocratic closure, it shows how resilience framed solely in terms of system stability or technological robustness can drift into stagnation, surveillance or social fragmentation, as in Clarke’s self-contained city or Ballard’s psychologically disintegrating climate landscapes. At the same time, these narratives suggest that survival is never purely technical: it is mediated by memory, affect, social bonds and the capacity to re-imagine collective purpose. In this sense, dystopia operates both as a critique of resilience reduced to control and adaptation as well as an invitation to ask whose resilience is being secured and what the social cost is.

The intersection between community perspectives and hyper-technological futures is therefore neither harmonious nor linear. It is mediated by institutions, policies and expert cultures that translate local vulnerabilities and aspirations into abstract categories of risk, performance and innovation. This mediation can enable resilience by mobilising resources and coordinating action, but it can also render resilience more complex and fragile by narrowing the range of legitimate futures and limiting alternative pathways grounded in distributed or relational forms of knowledge.

In this setting, counter-narratives can challenge technocratic and elite-driven scripts of resilience by foregrounding lived experience, historical inequities and place-based knowledge, and by questioning the assumption that technological acceleration and innovation automatically equate to collective well-being. Like strands of speculative and dystopian fiction that privilege communal survival, mutual aid or ecological embeddedness over heroic techno-solutions, these counter-narratives reframe resilience as a transformative, relational and political practice rather than a technical fix. They expose the partiality of dominant policy epistemologies and insist that futures are not simply to be engineered, but to be negotiated, narrated and ethically co-constructed.

*This reflection was presented as part of the First International Symposium of the ECOPIA Network.