Futures

This book examines the relevance of futures and future studies to literary studies. It demonstrates how the growing interest in futures thinking is opening up multidisciplinary conversations and initiatives.

List of contents

• 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: Rüdiger 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 Benqué: Making an Almanac; Producing Predictions between Data Science and Astrology


• 27: S. M. Amadae: Life as Algorithm


• 28: Benoît Pelopidas: The Birth of Nuclear Eternity


• 29: Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom: Future by Design: Seductive Technologies of Anticipation within the Future Industry


• 30: Paolo Cardini: The Global Futures Lab: A Search for Hyper-contextualized Futures

About the author

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.

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.

Product details

• Authors: Sandra (Director Kemp
• Assisted by: Jenny Andersson (Editor), Andersson Jenny (Editor), Sandra Kemp (Editor), Kemp Sandra (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 21.10.2021
• EAN: 9780198806820
• ISBN: 978-0-19-880682-0
• No. of pages: 572
• Series: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; PHILOSOPHY / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, Philosophy, Literary theory