Anthropology has a critical, practical role to play in contemporary debates about futures. This game-changing new book presents new ways of conceptualising how to engage with a future-oriented research agenda, demonstrating how anthropologists can approach futures both theoretically and practically, and introducing a set of innovative research methods to tackle this field of research.
Anthropology and Futures brings together a group of leading scholars from across the world, including Sarah Pink, Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Paul Stoller. Firmly grounded in ethnographic fieldwork experience, the book's fifteen chapters traverse ethnographies with people living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda, disability activists in the U.S., young Muslim women in Copenhagen, refugees in Milan, future-makers in Barcelona, and planning and land futures in the UK, the design of workspaces in Melbourne, rewilding in the French Pyrenees, and speculative ethnographies among emerging communities in Antarctica.
Taking a strong interdisciplinary approach, the authors respond to growing interest in the topic of futures in anthropology and beyond. This ground-breaking text is a call for more engaged, interventional and applied anthropologies. It is essential reading for students and researchers in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, design and research methods.
Juan Francisco Salazar is Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at Western Sydney University, Australia
Sarah Pink is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Australia
Andrew Irving is Director of the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UK
Johannes Sjöberg is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, UK
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors
1. A Manifesto for Future Anthropologies
EASA Future Anthropologies Network
2. Anthropology and Futures: Setting the Agenda
Sarah Pink, RMIT, Australia and Juan Francisco Salazar, University of Western Sydney, Australia
3. The Art of Turning Left and Right
Andrew Irving, University of Manchester, UK
4. Cripping the Future: Making Disability Count
Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, New York University, USA
5. Contemporary Obsessions with Time and the Promise of the Future
Simone Abram, Durham University, UK
6. Pyrenean Rewilding and Colliding Ontological Landscapes: A Future(s) Dwelt-in Ethnographic Approach
Anthony Knight, University of Kent, UK
7. Digital Technologies, Dreams and Disconcertment in Anthropological World-Making
Karen Waltorp, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
8. Future in the Ethnographic World
Débora Lanzeni and Elisenda Ardèvol, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain
9. Researching Future as an Alterity of the Present
Sarah Pink, Yoko Akama and Annie Fergusson, RMIT, Australia
10. Speculative Fabulation: Modes for Researching Worlds to Come in Antarctica
Juan Francisco Salazar, University of Western Sydney, Australia
11. Ethno Science Fiction: Projective Improvisations of Future Scenarios and Environmental Threats in the Everyday Life of British Youth
Johannes Sjöberg, University of Manchester, UK
12.Reaching for the Horizon: Exploring Existential Possibilities of Migration and Movement within the Past-Present-Future through Participatory Animation
Alexandra D'Onofrio, University of Manchester, UK
13. Agency and Dramatic Storytelling: Roving through Pasts, Presents and Futures
Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, York University, Canada
14. Remix as a Literacy for Future Anthropology Practice
Annette N. Markham, Aarhus University, Denmark
Afterword: Flying toward the Future on the Wings of Wind
Paul Stoller, West Chester University, USA
Index