Mapping the Futures

There are now new experiences of space and time; new tensions between globalism and regionalism, socialism and consumerism, reality and spectacle; new instabilities of value, meaning and identity. How are we to understand these? What is to be the future of thinking about the future? This book aims to bring together cultural theorists from different disciplines to assess the implications of economic, political and social change for intellectual inquiry and cultural practice. The collection offers radical reformulations of cultural theory in response to political, economic and technological change. In particular it focuses upon the intellectual project of speculating on the future, and the possibilities for critical utopian thought. The authors review the relationships between new pasts and unfolding futures; the effects of a more extensive geo-cultural consciousness; the implications of new configurations of power, authority and position for communities and identities.