Towards Mapping and Defining Critical Hype Studies: Multidisciplinary Insights and Future Directions

Hype is no longer a peripheral element of technoscientific discourse; it is a central force shaping how futures are imagined, circulated, and enacted within innovation cultures. This position paper inaugurates Critical Hype Studies (CHS) as a collective, multidisciplinary field dedicated to unpacking the sociotechnical, affective, economic, and political dynamics of hype. Building on diverse disciplinary perspectives and empirical cases, we argue that hype is not mere exaggeration or distortion, but a structuring condition intertwined with funding, legitimacy, and power. Hype acts as a mobilizing, exclusionary, and performative phenomenon, shaping what futures are considered possible and fundable, often narrowing alternatives while amplifying dominant narratives. We offer a genealogy of hype, engaging with its historical, economic, and ideological roots, and survey adjacent theoretical frameworks, including the sociology of expectations, narratology, and other adjacent theories. Methodologically, CHS employs a broad spectrum from ethnography and discourse analysis to computational and artistic interventions, foregrounding reflexivity and cross-disciplinary openness. Key challenges – such as the “hype paradox,” harms and impacts, and discipline boundaries – are interrogated, alongside recommendations for future research, civic engagement, and educational curricula to enhance “hype literacy.” Our paper maps CHS as a dynamic and reflexive endeavour, inviting broader scholarly and public participation to critically understand and shape the infrastructures and imaginaries through which hype circulates and endures. In doing so, the CHS programme aims to empower more equitable, plural, and sustainable technoscientific realities and imaginations.