Futures

Edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Includes contributions across arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM subjects
Engages with a wide range of current initiatives to reassess and provide alternatives to Western linear conceptions of historical which have underpinned dominant conceptions of the future
Examines the implications of representational practices for how futures can be made, imagined, managed, influenced, and known

Futures

Edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

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.

Futures

Edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

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, Rüdiger 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 Benqué
27:Life as Algorithm, S. M. Amadae
28:The Birth of Nuclear Eternity, Benoît Pelopidas
29:Future by Design: Seductive Technologies of Anticipation within the Future Industry, Christina Garsten and Adrienne Sörbom
30:The Global Futures Lab: A Search for Hyper-contextualized Futures, Paolo Cardini

Futures

Edited by Sandra Kemp and Jenny Andersson

Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature

Author Information

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

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.

Contributors:

Mohamed-Ali Adraoui
S. M. Amadae
Arjun Appadurai
Zeke Baker
David Benqué
Paolo Cardini
Liliana Doganova
Georgina H. Endfield
Keri Facer
Christina Garsten
Jennifer M. Gidley
Rüdiger Graf
John R. Hall
Rodney Harrison
John Holmes
Paolo Jedlowski
Sandra Kemp
Charne Lavery
Busiso Moyo
Julia Nordblad
Mat Paskins
Vincenza Pellegrino
Benoît Pelopidas
Laura Pereira
Egle Rindzeviciute
Anders Sandberg
Odirilwe Selomane
Johan Siebers
Nadia Sitas
Rike Sitas
Adrienne Sörbom
Apolline Taillandier
Christopher Trisos
Jacob Ward
Ian Wei
R. John Williams
Laura Wittman
Linda Woodhead