Critical Futures | Book Series (2023-)
Eds.: Moritz Ingwersen, Solvejg Nitzke, Regina Schober, Jens Temmen
This book series brings together critical perspectives on the discourses, narratives, and cultural practices that shape imaginaries of “the future.” Positioning futures as critical asks us to recognize the role of worldmaking in the face of multiple planetary crises as a matter of urgency and risk. At the same time, critical futures signify a turn towards complexity beyond the rhetoric of utopia and dystopia, mobilizing speculative modes for projects of social change and cultural critique. Drawing on intersections of fields such as the environmental humanities, speculative fiction, critical race theory, dis/ability studies, and science and technology studies, Critical Futures seeks to publish research that examines futures as a propositional and indeterminate horizon of thought that articulates the cultural entanglements of technoscientific, political, and environmental transformations.
Shaped by liberal humanism, colonial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and techno-optimism,many of the futures inscribed by modern progress narratives are fraught with the power dynamics and cultural practices that lie at the root of contemporary crises. Whether with regard to literary negotiations of climate futures or artistic interventions committed to algorithmic justice, examinations of past and present futures of human-technologyenvironment relations are able to reveal the constellations of agency at stake in remediating the structures of Western modernity. Beyond the promises of a technological fix, what is needed are nuanced analyses of the socio-technical ramifications, ecological traces, and ideological infrastructures of how futures have been imagined and materialized, curtailed and erased.
Critical Futures engages the humanities, literature, and the arts as systems of cultural production that constitute and reflect hegemonic notions of the “human,” “nature,” “science,” “progress,” “environment” and “future,” but that also offer strategies and affective grammars of estrangement, fabulation, and resistance for envisioning worlds otherwise. What, then, does it mean to perpetuate, disrupt, or complicate modern stories and aesthetics of futuring? Invested in inclusive, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approaches, Critical Futures offers opportunities to explore the potential of literature and the arts to shift habitual ways of ordering the world and strives to promote epistemologies, pedagogies, and ethics suited to the messy realities of more equitable and ecologically viable futures.
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