Futures

by Kemp, Sandra; Andersson, Jenny

• ISBN13: 9780191898358
• ISBN10: 019189835X
• Format: eBook
• Copyright: 2021-02-10
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Futures examines the relevance of futures studies to literary studies. It demonstrates how the growing interest in futures thinking is opening up multidisciplinary conversations and initiatives, examining historical and contemporary forms of futures knowledge, the methodologies and technologies of futures expertise, and the role played by different institutions on legitimising, deploying, and controlling anticipatory practices.

Bringing together emerging perspectives on the future from diverse disciplinary perspectives including critical theory, design, anthropology, sociology, politics, and history, this book places the provocation of power at the heart of the book through an investigation of futures as both objects of science and objects of the human imagination, creativity, and will. A multidisciplinary team of contributors challenge and debate the varied ways in which futures are conjured and constructed, exploring issues as diverse as the utopian imagination, history and philosophy, literary and political manifestos, artefacts and design fictions, and forms of technological and financial forecasting, big data, climate modelling, and scenarios.

The book positions the future as a question of power, of representations and counter-representations, and forms of struggle over future imaginaries. Forms of futures-making depend on complex processes of envisioning and embodiment. Each chapter investigates the critical vocabularies, genres, and representational methods - narrative, quantitative, visual, and material - of futures-making as deeply contested fields in cultural and social life.

Author Biography

Sandra Kemp, Director, The Ruskin Library, Museum and Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK,Jenny Andersson, Professor, Swedish Colloqium for Advanced Study (SCAS), Uppsala, Sweden.

Professor Sandra Kemp is Director of the Ruskin Library, Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. She is an academic and curator and has held senior research roles and curated exhibitions at the National Portrait Galleries in London and the Smithsonian, Washington, the Royal College of Art, the Wellcome Trust, the Science Museum, V&A London, and The Ruskin. Her research specialisms include literary and feminist theory, visual and material cultures, heritage/museology and futures studies. Kemp has published articles, book chapters and monographs on topics such as future histories, museum futures and design, and on figures such as John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling and John Ruskin. She has extensive editorial experience, including co-editing readers and companions on feminisms, Edwardian fiction and Rudyard Kipling.

Professor Jenny Andersson is a Professor at the University of Upsala Sweden. She is an intellectual and political historian, and won the CNRS bronze medal for her early career research in 2015. Andersson is the author of several books, including Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way (Manchester University Press, 2006), The Library and the Workshop: Social Democracy and Capitalism in an Age of Knowledge (Stanford University Press, 2010) and with The Struggle for the Long Term: Transnational Perspectives on Science and Politics in the Cold War (Routledge, 2015). Her most recent book is The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post-Cold War Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Table of Contents

I. Future Histories
1. The Future Boardgame: Prediction as Power over Time, Jenny Andersson
2. Preservation as Future Assembling Practices, Rodney Harrison
3. A Space for Time: Museums as Futures Imaginaries, Sandra Kemp
4. Voices Prophesying Everything: Tracing Futures in Twentieth-Century Periodicals, Mat Paskins
5. Ignorance Is Bliss: The Pluralization of the Future as a Challenge to Contemporary History, R?diger Graf
6. Italian Futurism and the Explosive 'Now', Laura Wittman
II. Knowing the Future
7. Futures Honed, Barbara Adam
8. Futures Studies: An Evolving Radical Epistemology, Jennifer Gidley
9. Future as an Horizon of Expectations, Paolo Jedlowski and Vincenza Pellegrino
10. Creativity and the Ontology of Not-yet Being, Johan Siebers
11. Nineteen Eighty-Four in the British Telecom System: Computers, Science Fiction and Thatcherism in British Telecom, Jacob Ward
12. Universities, Futures, and Temporal Ambiguity, Keri Facer and Ian Wei
III. Salvation and Apocalypse
13. Apocalyptic, World-Repair, Divination: Persistent Modes of Future-knowing and their Continuing Relevance, Linda Woodhead
14. Climate Change, Apocalypse and the Future of Salvation, John R. Hall and Zeke Baker
15. Future Weather: Imagining and Articulating Uncertainty, Georgina Endfield
16. African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene, Laura Pereira, Busiso Moyo, Charne Lavery, Nadia Sitas, Rike Sitas, Odirilwe Selomane, Christopher Trisos, Wakanda Phambili
17. The Scarcity of Social Futures in the Digital Era, Arjun Appadurai
18. Future and Prophecies in the World Vision of The Islamic State Organization: Between Offensive Millenarianism and Precipitated Eschatologism, Mohamed-Ali Adraoui
IV: Futures of Life
19. Post-Human Design: The Crafted Human Body and the Exoself, Anders Sandberg
20. Transhumanists and Posthuman Imaginaries, Apolline Taillandier
21. Myths of the Future: Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, John Holmes
22. Concepts of Future Generations: Four Contemporary Examples, Julia Nordblad
23. Discounting the Future: A Political Technology, Liliana Doganova
V: Future Worlds
24. Beyond Computation: Scenario Planning and the Spiritual Art of Multiple Futures, R. John Williams
25. The Cybernetic Prediction: Orchestrating the Future, Egle Rindzeviciute
26. Making an Almanac; Producing Predictions between Data Science and Astrology, David Benqu?
27. Life as Algorithm, S. M. Amadae
28. The Birth of Nuclear Eternity, Beno?t Pelopidas
29. Future by Design: Seductive Technologies of Anticipation within the Future Industry, Christina Garsten and Adrienne S?rbom
30. The Global Futures Lab: A Search for Hyper-contextualized Futures, Paolo Cardini