Am 17.01.2018 hielt Dr. Roberto Cantoni einen öffentlichen Vortrag an der Universität Augsburg zum Schiefergasabbau in Polen. Dr. Cantoni ist im Wintersemester 2017/18 auf Einladung von Prof. Dr. Reiner Keller Gastprofessor am Jakob-Fugger-Zentrum.

In the last decades the construction of technoscientific futures has become a common activity in the management of a vast number of the economic sectors. Agencies, public and private, governmental and non-governmental, increasingly resort to the expertise of modellers and scenario makers to anticipate what possible futures may look like in their fields of action. But scenarios and models are not just prediction tools: instead, they often become the basis for the formulation of technoscientific promises, the performativity of which depends on the sociotechnical imaginaries in which they are embedded. In the case study and this lecture– shale gas in Poland straddling the late 2000s and early 2010s – Dr. Roberto Cantoni shows that the promises of energy autonomy and a ‘greener’ future, deriving from overoptimistic geological models and the planned application of innovative extraction technologies to geological formations, enabled their proponents to mobilise adequate people and means to trigger a shale rush that was eventually to deceive expectations.