I am very pleased to share that my new article, “Sociotechnical imaginaries and enabling infrastructures: Türkiye’s digitally mediated pandemic response,” has now been published online in Medical Humanities.
The article asks a question that reaches beyond the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic: What makes innovation possible, and under which social, institutional and infrastructural conditions does it become legitimate?
Taking the case of 3D printing during the pandemic in Türkiye, I examine how maker communities, hospitals, technoparks and state innovation agendas became connected in the rapid production of medical equipment. Rather than understanding these developments simply as technological responses to an emergency, I approach them as sociotechnical processes in which practices of care, production and responsibility were reorganised.
A central concept I develop in the article is that of “enabling infrastructures.” The concept draws attention to the heterogeneous arrangements that make particular forms of innovation technically possible, socially legitimate and politically imaginable. These infrastructures enable rapid and flexible responses, but they also generate tensions: between openness and standardisation, civic participation and unevenly distributed labour, and aspirations for technological sovereignty and continued global dependencies.
From this perspective, innovation is not a linear process in which a new technology is developed and subsequently introduced into society. It emerges through relations between technologies, institutions, forms of expertise, political imaginaries and practices of care.
For me, the article therefore also contributes to a broader discussion in Science and Technology Studies and innovation research about how innovation is made, who is able to participate in it, and whose work and knowledge become visible in the process.
Şahinol, M. (2026). “Sociotechnical imaginaries and enabling infrastructures: Türkiye’s digitally mediated pandemic response.” Medical Humanities, Published Online First, 7 September 2026. DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2026-014074
If you are interested in reading the article and do not have access, please feel free to contact me. I am happy to share a copy.