Anthropologies and Futures: Researching Emerging and Uncertain Worlds

Description

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, 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, AustraliaSarah Pink is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, AustraliaAndrew Irving is Director of the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, UKJohannes Sjoeberg is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, UK

This collection is the clearest articulation yet of a future-oriented practice for anthropology. It attempts nothing less than a re-centering of anthropology along future temporalities, opening up the field to new dimensions of public engagement by sketching the contours of a fieldwork-based practice centered on emergence, possibility and, ultimately, on the hope for better lives for people in the communities where we work. The papers in this volume range over multiple subjects, multiple methods and multiple media-multiple approaches to the future in anthropology. The breadth is not only testament to the robustness of the future anthropologies they advocate, but to the centrality of the future to the anthropology we already practice. Engaging a variety of methods (lifestory, interviews, participant observation), a variety of platforms (digital media, performance, photography), the contributors to this collection suggest the ways in which anthropology has always already been about the future, while at the same time gesturing to what anthropology may yet become. * Samuel Gerald Collins, Towson University, USA * Anthropologies and Futures gathers a plethora of innovative perspectives and practices that brilliantly explore how the ethnographic can creatively and critically engage with the yet-to-come. This is an agenda-setting volume that by placing 'futures' at the heart of methodological engagement, re-configures the analytic, ethical and political landscapes of anthropology and beyond. * Mike Michael, University of Exeter, UK * This book aims to put ethnography and anthropology at the heart of futures study right where they should be. Humans tend to be future-oriented in a social, but not uniform manner; the future is a site of struggle. This is a book which should make readers think and feel. Naturally, you will sometimes disagree with the positions taken, but if ever I met a book I'd like to be an author in, it would be this one. * Jonathan Paul Marshall, University of Technology Sydney, Australia *