The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future

ISBN-13: 9781138858534 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 256 str.

Egl Rindzevi I. T.; Jenny Andersson

Opis

This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third World. A forgotten problem of cultural history, the future re-emerges in this volume as a fundamentally contested field in which forms of control and central forms of resistance met, as different actors set out to colonise and control and others to liberate. The individual studies of this book show how the West European, African, Romanian and Czechoslovak "long term" was constructed through forms of expertise, computer simulations and models, and they reveal how such constructions both opened up new realities but also imposed limits on possible futures.

Spis treści

Foreword  Michael D. Gordin  Introduction: Toward a New History of the Future  Jenny Andersson and Eglė Rindzevičiūtė  1. Midwives of the Future: Futurism, Futures Studies and the Shaping of the Global Imagination  Jenny Andersson  2. Expertise for the Future: The Emergence of Environmental Prediction c.1920-1970  Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin  3. Energy Futures from the Social Market Economy to the Energiewende: The Politicization of West German Energy Debates, 1950-1990  Stefan Cihan Aykut  4. Technoscientific Cornucopian Futures versus Doomsday Futures: The World Models and The Limits to Growth  Elodie Vieille-Blanchard  5. Towards a Joint Future Beyond the Iron Curtain: East-West Politics of Global Modelling  Eglė Rindzevičiūtė  6. Forecasting the Post-Socialist Future: Prognostika in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia, 1970–1989  Vítězslav Sommer  7. Official and Unofficial Futures of the Communism System: Romanian Futures Studies Between Control and Dissidence  Ana-Maria Cătănuş  8. Virtually Nigeria: USAID, Simulated Futures, and the Politics of Postcolonial Expertise, 1964-1980  Kevin Baker  9. Pan-Africanism, Socialism and the Future: Development Planning in Ghana, 1951-1966  Jeff Grischow and Holger Weiss

O autorze

Jenny Andersson is CNRS research professor at the Center for European Studies of Sciences po, Paris.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is a researcher at the Center for European Studies of Sciences po, Paris, and Associate Professor in Culture Studies at Linköping University, Sweden.