Abstract
The concept of the future, its prognostications and its applications increasingly shapes present social worlds. From government policy to architectural design, from preemptive everyday practices to interventionist counter-cultural projects, imaginations of the future take concrete form and enjoy a powerful purpose. In this intervention we ask: How is the future invented, planned, renounced and researched? Specifically, how do we analyse the entanglement of temporal and spatial logics against the enveloping imperative of ‘future as crisis’? What is the role of methodology, collaboration and engagement in shaping debates about the future, and how do we research different futures as well as different positionalities within the future? Rather than taking a prescriptive approach, we consider future epistemologies as well as concrete future practices and the ways in which multiple notions of futurity might overlap. Additionally, we consider the standpoint from which different futures are imagined or renounced, and the ways in which
entanglements of past, present and future might reflect a struggle on different social fields. Finally, we complicate some of the distinctions that researchers draw between the practices of imagining, planning and producing future scenarios as exclusionary, and modes of navigating and shaping futures that are embedded in everyday lives.
Chakkalakal, Silvy