Sociotechnical imaginaries and enabling infrastructures: Türkiye's digitally mediated pandemic response

This article examines how 3D printing emerged as an enabling technology during the COVID-19 pandemic in Türkiye and how its emergency deployment helped shape post-pandemic futures of care, production and sociotechnical coordination. Drawing on sociotechnical imaginaries, infrastructure studies and feminist science and technology studies approaches to care, I argue that pandemic responses did not simply introduce new tools but reorganised practices of care and production and redistributed responsibility among actors. Empirically, the paper combines situated field engagement in a makerspace and subsequent tracing of its pandemic-related activities with qualitative analysis of institutional documents, media reports and scientific literature on digital health and additive manufacturing. The analysis traces how heterogeneous infrastructures linking maker communities, hospitals, technoparks and state innovation agendas stabilised imaginaries of rapid response, civic participation and future-oriented healthcare. I use the concept of enabling infrastructures to show how these arrangements made particular interventions technically possible, socially legitimate and politically imaginable. They also exposed tensions between openness and standardisation, civic empowerment and unevenly distributed labour, and technosovereign aspirations and continued global dependencies. Taken together, these tensions reveal how encounters among engineering, medicine and civic making reshaped expectations about who should care, who could legitimately innovate and whose work became visible within post-pandemic health infrastructures.