ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on collectively held ideas or visions and on their role in reordering science-society relations by carving out a 'socio-scientific imaginary of preserving and preventing' that is co-constitutive with sustainability research in Austria. ProVISION, as well as its predecessors, must be understood against the background of an ongoing debate taking place in both academia and policy about changing modes of producing knowledge. The funding scheme proVISION, with its emphasis on transdisciplinary research, is a perfect site to explore how certain imaginations of attainable futures are slowly assembled, rehearsed and stabilized and for studying how they become mutually constitutive with particular ideas about integrating science and society. The chapter examines how desirable futures are imagined in Austrian sustainability research, how they are related to scientific (re-)orderings and how new modes of knowledge production are expected to contribute to their actualization. The chapter describes the temporal and spatial constitution of environmental problems in proVISION and in sustainability contexts more generally.
