Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures

ISBN-13: 9781138688360 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 236 str.

Alex Wilkie; Martin Savransky; Marsha Rosengarten

Opis

Is another future possible? So called late modernity is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social natural, techno scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation."

Spis treści

Introduction  1. The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research  Part 1: Speculative Propositions
Section Introduction  2. The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism  3. Speculative Research, Temporality and Politics  4. Situated Speculation as a Constraint on Thought  Part 2: Speculative Lures  Section Introduction  5. Pluralities of Action, a Lure for Speculative Thought  6. Doing Speculation to Curtail Speculation  7. Retrocasting: Speculating about the Origins of Money  Part 3: Speculative Techniques 
Section Introduction  8. Sociology’s Archive: Mass-Observation as a Site of Speculative Research  9. Developing Speculative Methods to Explore Speculative Shipping: Mail Art, Futurity and Empiricism  10. Creating Idiotic Speculators: Disaster Cosmopolitics in the Sandbox  11.'Too Sweet to Kill' – A Contribution to the Art of Cosmopolitics  Part 4: Speculative Implications  Section Introduction  12. On Isabelle Stengers’ ‘Cosmopolitics’: A Speculative Adventure  13. Aesthetic Experience, Speculative Thought, and Civilized Life  14. The Lure of the Possible: On the Function of Speculative  Afterword  15. Postscript