Futures
Published on 21. October 2021
Book
Hardback
572 pages
978-0-19-880682-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
The volume works well as an introductory and overview work. Readers who are looking for an insight into the international field of research on futures will find what they are looking for, especially since the articles are widely quoted and further literature is recommended. * Kirstin Jorns, H-Soz-Kult * Richly textured, Futures tackles some of the unexplored potential of literature's unique knowing and making of futures. * Maxim Shadurski, Modern Language Review *More details
Series
Edition
1
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 183 mm
Thickness: 40 mm
Weight
1192 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-880682-0 (9780198806820)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Professor Sandra Kemp is Director, The Ruskin-Library, Museum and Research Centre at Lancaster University. She is Professor in the History Department at Lancaster University and Visiting Professor at Imperial College London. As an academic and curator, her futures-related work spans the exhibition and monograph Future Face: Image, Innovation, Identity (2004-6) at the London Science Museum and subsequent South Asian exhibition tour; The Future Is Our Business: The Visual History of Future Expertise project at the V&A (2013); and Ruskin: Museum of the Near Future at The Ruskin, Lancaster University in 2019. She is Principal Investigator for the AHRC/Labex-funded Universal Histories and Universal Museums project on the role of the museums in Europe in building knowledge about the future.
Professor Jenny Andersson is Professor of the History of Ideas and Science at Upsala University, Sweden.
Professor Jenny Andersson is Professor of the History of Ideas and Science at Upsala University, Sweden.
Content
I. Future Histories 1: Jenny Andersson: The Future Boardgame: Prediction as Power over Time 2: Rodney Harrison: Preservation as Future Assembling Practices 3: Sandra Kemp: A Space for Time: Museums as Futures Imaginaries 4: Mat Paskins: Voices Prophesying Everything: Tracing Futures in Twentieth-Century Periodicals 5: Ruediger Graf: Ignorance Is Bliss: The Pluralization of the Future as a Challenge to Contemporary History 6: Laura Wittman: Italian Futurism and the Explosive 'Now' II. Knowing the Future 7: Barbara Adam: Futures Honed 8: Jennifer Gidley: Futures Studies: An Evolving Radical Epistemology 9: Paolo Jedlowski and Vincenza Pellegrino: Future as an Horizon of Expectations 10: Johan Siebers: Creativity and the Ontology of Not-yet Being 11: Jacob Ward: Nineteen Eighty-Four in the British Telecom System: Computers, Science Fiction and Thatcherism in British Telecom 12: Keri Facer and Ian Wei: Universities, Futures, and Temporal Ambiguity III. Salvation and Apocalypse 13: Linda Woodhead: Apocalyptic, World-Repair, Divination: Persistent Modes of Future-knowing and their Continuing Relevance 14: John R. Hall and Zeke Baker: Climate Change, Apocalypse and the Future of Salvation 15: Georgina Endfield: Future Weather: Imagining and Articulating Uncertainty 16: Laura Pereira, Busiso Moyo, Charne Lavery, Nadia Sitas, Rike Sitas, Odirilwe Selomane, Christopher Trisos, Wakanda Phambili: African Science Fiction for Reimagining the Anthropocene 17: Arjun Appadurai: The Scarcity of Social Futures in the Digital Era 18: Mohamed-Ali Adraoui: Future and Prophecies in the World Vision of The Islamic State Organization: Between Offensive Millenarianism and Precipitated Eschatologism IV: Futures of Life 19: Anders Sandberg: Post-Human Design: The Crafted Human Body and the Exoself 20: Apolline Taillandier: Transhumanists and Posthuman Imaginaries 21: John Holmes: Myths of the Future: Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men 22: Julia Nordblad: Concepts of Future Generations: Four Contemporary Examples 23: Liliana Doganova: Discounting the Future: A Political Technology V: Future Worlds 24: R. John Williams: Beyond Computation: Scenario Planning and the Spiritual Art of Multiple Futures 25: Egle Rindzeviciute: The Cybernetic Prediction: Orchestrating the Future 26: David Benque: Making an Almanac; Producing Predictions between Data Science and Astrology 27: S. M. Amadae: Life as Algorithm 28: Benoit Pelopidas: The Birth of Nuclear Eternity 29: Christina Garsten and Adrienne Soerbom: Future by Design: Seductive Technologies of Anticipation within the Future Industry 30: Paolo Cardini: The Global Futures Lab: A Search for Hyper-contextualized Futures