Focus and rationale
The Special Issue explores the diversity of visions and practices of future-making in the global, multifaceted crisis of capitalist/colonial modernity. It seeks to illuminate social contestations, imaginations, and negotiations over collective futures: What kind of future is likely, what is desirable, and what are possible ways to shape tomorrow’s society? What are people’s hopes, fears, ideas and strategies for a social transformation?
Confronted with capitalist crises, climate change, pandemics, political violence, and war, people all over the world reflect on and struggle for different futures. On the one hand, a sense of rising threats and uncertainty spurs anxieties and apocalyptic visions. On the other, moments of crisis and failure may open the space to renegotiate social change and to (re)create diverse hopes for the future (Traverso 2017). Against this background and after the “rise and decline of future studies” in the 20th century (Seefried 2015), research on the future is gaining new momentum, both within sociology and as an inter- and trans-disciplinary field of academic inquiry across the social sciences and humanities (Brown/Rappert/Webster 2000; Fischer 2009; Andersson/Kemp 2021; Schulz 2016).
In accordance with Markus Schulz (2016: 8), we contend that “[f]utures research can be understood as that part of sociology that is focused on the dynamics of future making and imagination, current trends, likely and possible scenarios, and their social implications.” While the issue of possible future(s) of society has been present in sociological reasoning from the very beginning of the discipline, it has been absent in debates and curricula for several decades. With this special issue we contribute to current attempts to bring the future back in. Yet, in contrast to those trends within contemporary future(s) studies that are interested in developing forecasts or mapping out possible future scenarios, we ask how future imaginations are socially constructed and negotiated: How do social actors at the grassroots shape the heterogeneity of visions and future-making practices, and how do their struggles over hope shape the present? Such future-oriented research can make important contributions, first, to a committed sociology that seeks to relate to contemporary public debates and to make possible and alternative futures heard. Second, the sociological interest in historical contingency and human agency does not only prepare the ground for future research (Schulz 2019). What is more, future research can contribute to sociological endeavors in understanding the diverse and intersecting inequalities inherent in knowledge production, in contentious and emancipatory politics, as well as in struggles over competing interpretations of the world.
Our contribution to these sociological debates will benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. Taking the negotiation of future imaginations and future-making practices as a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological point of departure, we will draw on debates in sociology as well as in social and cultural anthropology, literary studies, political science, and critical theory, which address a variety of topics and themes such as the conceptualisation of future orientations and temporalities (Bryant/Knight 2019), the future of capitalism (Bahng 2018; Beckert 2016; Boldizzoni 2020; Fishwick/Kiersey 2021; Milanović 2021), human and non-human survival within capitalist and climate crises (Haraway 2016; Sheller 2020; Tsing 2015), affective relations to the future and the unequal distribution of hope or aspiration (Appadurai 2013; Berlant 2011, Hage 2016, Kleist and Jansen 2016), Black futures and afrotopias (Kelly 2020; Sarr, Burk, and Jones-Boardman 2020), and the future of political contestations, social struggles, and solidarity movements (Castells 2015; Conway/Dufour/Masson 2021; Escobar 2020; Haiven/Khasnabish 2014; Juris 2008).
This Special Issue seeks to contribute to these discussions by departing from the hypothesis that whether and how people relate to the future in the here and now is a crucial lens to make sense of political practices, imaginations, and narratives as well as to understand who remains silent and excluded from future-making. Therefore, the Special Issue aims to explore the following questions:
- How do collective future imaginations emerge and develop at the crossroads of hopes and anxieties in times of global crises? What relationship therefore exists between utopian imaginations and dystopian constructions of the status quo? Exploring future-making as ongoing practices in the present, taking place in “the ruins of capitalism” (Tsing 2015), we ask what kind of future(s) within or beyond capitalism can be outlined (Milanović 2021; Fishwick/Kiersey 2021) without falling into the trap of “foretelling the end of capitalism” (Boldizzoni 2020).
- How can we make productive use of “utopia as method” (Levitas 2013) by exploring the relationship between social structures, imaginations of the future, and the agency of future-making? How do actors interpret their own agency and (in)ability to shape the near or long-term future? How do social and material conditions, such as capitalist models of development and modernity (Bennike/Rasmussen/Nielsen 2020; Berlant 2011; Hage 2009; Hage/Papadopoulos 2004), coloniality and postcolonial conditions (Young 2012; Quijano 2014; Lugones 2007), as well as gendered, racial and other forms of inequality and difference (Chen 2021), shape future imaginations and struggles over the future?
Departing from these questions, the Special Issue will bring together contributions which account for the empirical variety of future imaginations:
- First, the contributions will explore different settings and contexts of crisis, asking how collective future imaginations and future making practices are negotiated in social struggles over human-nature relations, climate crisis, capitalist extractivism, and rural change, over industrial and postcolonial futures, in contestations over the distribution of wealth, recognition, and border regimes, as well as in negotiations over conviviality and belonging.
- Second, the Special Issue asks for different scopes and horizons of future struggles which include: a) contestations over hope in everyday life as well as prefigurative politics and utopian thinking in social movements; b) a continuum of restorative, reformative, and transformative imaginations as well as future making practices that take the form of disruption, adaptation or apparent passivity; and c) analytical and affective engagements with future possibilities, or, as Ernst Bloch puts it, the cold and warm stream of imagination (Bloch 1959: 235-242).
- Thirdly, the contributions engage with the practices and perspectives of a broad variety of actors belonging to indigenous, feminist, migrant, queer or Black movements as well as workers, peasant, or student organisations. In that way we also seek to explore how social differentiations and stratifications in the present ex/include certain actors from imagining or creating future(s). This implies asking, not only what the future(s) of these actors are, but also who counts as an agent of future-making practices. Finally, the growing debates on posthumanism and critiques of anthropocentrism urge us to scrutinise the interplay and agency of both human and non-human actors in future-making.
The compilation will bring together different disciplinary, methodological, and conceptual approaches to struggles for hope and negotiations over future(s) in times of global crises. The Special Issue seeks to make a contribution within a (re)emerging field of transdisciplinary future studies by a) exploring heterogeneous future-making practices at the intersection of anxiety and hope; b) taking imaginations of future(s), hopes, and utopian visions as a point of departure to understand present social configurations and struggles; and finally, c) by identifying common dimensions of future-making such as temporalities, territories, spaces, and agencies, which reveal commonalities as well as tensions and even contradictions.
Schedule
We invite authors from any discipline to send an abstract (maximum 300 words) including title, author(s) and institutional affiliation to sebastian.garbe@sk.hs-fulda.de or corinna.land@sk.hs-fulda.de by January 28th 2024. By late February 2024, we will invite authors to write their texts, and will inform all others about our decision. The deadline for the submission of full articles (40,000 characters, including spaces) is June 30th, 2024. After editorial assessment and double-blind review, corrections and proof-reading, the special issue will be published in print and online (green open access) in spring 2025.
Guidelines
Please submit abstracts and full papers in English. Communication with the editors may take place in English or German. Further information for potential authors is available here. For any questions regarding the procedures of publication, please contact clemens.pfeffer@mattersburgerkreis.at. For previous articles and issues of the journal, have a look at our archive.
Special Issue Editors
Sebastian Garbe holds a PhD in sociology and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences and coordinator of the research group on Human Rights and Social Justice at the same institution. His areas of research are post- and decolonial theory, solidarity and development studies, (transnational) social movements with a regional interest in Latin America and the Caribbean. Currently he is working on the future-making practices of the climate justice movement.
Corinna Land is a social scientist and is currently writing her dissertation at the Ruhr University Bochum. As a research associate at Fulda University of Applied Sciences, she coordinates the internationalisation of the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Science. Her research fields include the sociology of development, migration studies, and the agrarian question. Looking at struggles over rural futures in Paraguay, her dissertation explores the negotiation of hope in everyday life and its ambiguous role in the (de)politicisation of development, in contestations over migration and belonging, and in conflicts over land and security.
Eva Gerharz is Professor of Sociology with a special focus on globalisation at the Department of Social and Cultural Sciences and the Director of the Fulda Graduate Centre of Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in sociology from Bielefeld University. Her areas of interest are development and social movements, migration and conflict, with a particular focus on indigenous activism in Bangladesh. She is engaged in a number of collaborative research encounters with partners from the Global South.
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