Futures Seminar and Lab
EASA Future Anthropologies Network
IN3 Barcelona 22 – 24 June 2015

Convenors:

Sarah Pink (RMIT University)
Juan Francisco Salazar (University of Western Sydney)
Elisenda Ardévol (IN3-Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)

Content:

Futures Seminar and Lab explores the different approaches to researching the future across the social sciences and humanities and in particular in the context of anthropological field. The notion of `future´ acquires many meanings in the various disciplines that study Media. Furthermore, future is conceptualized, theorized and utilized in differing ways. There are two big conceptual constructions that are playing central roles in the articulations of academic discourses of Media-futures. First, future as a “meaning giving device” associated with technological development aims at understanding how future operates/acts in the construction of meanings, as part of practices, as a goal in the present, as a vector in the development of Media, as a descriptor of hegemonic discourses, and so on. Second, forecasting the future is based on the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data, rather than to explain our past or interpret our present, taking the future as an analytical goal. The idea is that we can predict possible futures based on ethnographic fieldwork as any other qualitative and quantitative methods using speculation, fabulation and productive methods like design and narrativity.

Futures Seminar and Lab focuses on the set of core questions that contemporary anthropologists are confronting around how to encounter, embrace and intervene in the uncertainties and possibilities of working in an emergent and changing world.
https://futureanthropologies.net/2015/04/27/futures-seminar-and-lab-barcelona-2015/