Paper short abstract:

The paper engages with the ways in which processes of anticipation and foresight in think tank organizations involve the fashioning of fear alongside a cultivation of rationality, and how these two dimensions are simultaneously and variably drawn upon in the creation of future scenarios.

Paper long abstract:

In organizational settings, including think tanks, processes of anticipation and foresight are invested with emotions and rationalities. These are cultivated and used to mobilize around certain services and communicative processes in order to create a sense of direction and authority. For think tanks, providing possible and plausible visions of futures are key activities for attracting attention, gaining credibility, and ultimately for designing present and future actions. They employ a wide range of sophisticated tools, methods and models (metrics, indexes, forecasting and scenarios) to assist them in imagining possibilities, sketching trajectories, and providing a basis for decisions. In this process, a range of emotions are involved and intermingled. This paper is based on ethnographic work in several transnational think tanks involved in the charting of geopolitical future scenarios. We argue that the mapping of global futures to a large extent involves the making of a 'geopolitics of emotion.' In the voicing of 'global problems' and the presentation of 'desirable futures', the cultivation, articulation and management of fear, anxiety, and hope, as well as a reliance on rationality, reason, and evidence, are central components.

Paper short abstract:

Many innovation strategies are supposed to represent rational, quasi-algorithmic sets of procedures but in practice they depend for their success on the innovator's emotional constitution. Emotions thus turn out to be crucial resources for generating organizational futures.

Paper long abstract:

In the past few years, routinized business innovation has become a key dimension of the business world, a fact that has found expression in the rise of a class of professional innovation consultants. A significant share of these consultants have created a market for themselves by convincing business executives that they have managed to systematize the fast production of ideas for future products and services by developing rational, rule-governed innovation strategies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with innovation consultants in the U.S., I analyze a specific innovation strategy as it is utilized and applied in practice. I argue that although this innovation strategy is supposed to represent a rational, quasi-algorithmic set of procedures that can be automatically executed by anyone, including a computer software, in practice it depends for its success on the innovator's emotional constitution. Emotions thus turn out to be crucial organizational resources for generating organizational futures.

Paper short abstract:

Approaching ethnographically the advent of cybernetics and the institutionalization of an extensive apparatus for the collection and manipulation of statistical data in socialist Romania, I aim to reconstitute the economic and political futures envisioned by Romanian prospective thinkers.

Paper long abstract:

The 1970s brought an acute awareness of the limits of economic growth and the fear of the rapid depletion of natural resources "east" and "west" of the Iron Curtain. Far from irrational, such apprehensions were forms of educated concern premised on growing amounts of statistical data about nature, economy and society and by new disciplines able to incorporate the data into plausible theoretical models of the future: demographics, macroeconomic forecasting, environmental sciences, etc. Cybernetics, most of all such disciplines, both made possible a systematic vision of the catastrophic futures engendered by present actions and promised to offer efficient instruments for stirring the future towards desired trajectories. Approaching ethnographically the advent of cybernetics and the institutionalization of an extensive apparatus for the collection and manipulation of statistical data in socialist Romania, I aim to reconstitute the economic and political futures envisioned by Romanian prospective thinkers ('futurologists'). I conceptualize time as a malleable resource and ingredient of action that was effectively made up of statistical data series often antagonizing the visions of politicians and specialists and grounding passionate disputes about things to come. My presentation will pay attention both to the quantitative techniques and instruments used to structure economic interventions and to the affective economies that conveyed the urgency of reforms and revealed momentum in the dynamics of the economy. The techniques, visions, and anxieties produced in disciplines concerned with the future have framed our understanding of the economy at the time and continue to shape the world we live in.

Paper short abstract:

I use an institutional ethnography of the Parliament of Quebec to raise questions about the future direction of an entity whose political identity remains a question of fierce partisan debate. I contribute to broader anthropological debates about forms of political organization and sovereignty.

Paper long abstract:

I aim to contribute to this panel's interest in the role of emotions and rationalities in anticipating and imagining the future and senses of direction through a year-long ethnographic study of the Parliament of Quebec. Quebec demonstrates specific variations on three ongoing broader trends in politics today: (1) a reconfiguration of political forces (2) a broader questioning of sovereignty as the linchpin of politics and (3) new inflections of longstanding issues. Since the late 1990s or early 2000s, Quebec's political landscape has evolved in two broader ways that provides intriguing comparisons with nationalist populist movements, international institutions and transnational global governance. Namely, the longstanding debate over whether Quebec will or should be become politically and legally independent from Canada no longer subsumes almost every other issue. At the same time, Quebec has seen the rise of new political parties and the prominence of additional issues and cleavages in a society whose political elites on all sides of the provincial spectrum view as a "nation". As such, the Quebec case can allow us to rethink broader anthropological distinctions between sovereignty and independence as well as centre our focus on an infra-national form of political organization rarely studied as a political actor in its own right. At the same time, observing the reconfiguration of political forces from inside the confines of a parliament allows us to see how these partisan actors come to consensus, disagreement, bargaining and ambition on passionate issues new and old, including debates concerning Quebec's political identity.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the work invested in the production of a land-use plan in Bordeaux, France. It inquires how, besides manifesting desired routes for future developments, the plan provokes emotions among politicians, civil servants and planners, and hosts hope for shifting planning rationalities.

Paper long abstract:

Urban planning in France is undergoing what in the planning literature and urban policy is frequently comprehended as a shift from the rationale of a 'plan' to that of 'project'. When the intercommunal organization Bordeaux metropole in 2010 launched the revision of their land-use plan, the plan-making process was informed by ambitions to enable such a shift in the local planning practice. This paper draws on fieldwork among civil servants, planners and politicians involved in the plan-making process. It builds on a chapter of my ongoing dissertation work that attends to the work invested in the plan and expectations of its doings.

The land-use plan includes a strategy outlining visions and a zoning plan imposing regulations in the direction of the desired urban development. Ultimately, the plan is to coordinate actions by defining rights and obligations that construction permits are confirmed against. In Bordeaux, the plan was expected to play into the shift of rationale by reducing regulations, enhance negotiations and by functioning as a 'tool' rather than a 'rule book'. For politicians, the plan was a host for hopes to change rationalities and rearrange relations in the bureaucracy of planning. For civil servants charged with operationalizing its content, the plan provoked feelings of uncertainty and insecurity about what it required of changing practices and rearranged relations with citizens. I tentatively show how the plan, rather than providing a sense of direction towards achieving the proposed future scenarios, became a site of confusion.

Paper short abstract:

Arguing that in the practice of 'speculative design' reality and fiction form one continuous space where what is and what could be are merged to represent what should be this paper explores how scenarios of 'speculative design' are constructing norms of the present through imaginaries of the future.

Paper long abstract:

In a contribution in the Economist in 2010 Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design of the New York Museum of Modern Art, suggested that "one of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change". The design practitioners Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, both professors of Design and Social Inquiry and Fellows of the Graduate Institute for Design Ethnography and Social Thought at The New School in New York, expressed similar views with regard to the future of design in their publication "Speculative Everything, Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming" (2013): They wish to use practices of design to "unlock people's imaginations", to encourage people to experience "that everyday life could be different" and to invite people to explore "how things could be". Methods and tools inherent to the practice of design - experimentation, materialization and documentation - are used to create 'designerly' artifacts in order to map future scenarios situated between fact and fiction and present and future connecting possible futures with the familiar present. This paper argues that in the practice of 'speculative design' reality and fiction form one continuous space where what is and what could be are merged to represent what should be. Through this configuration fluid possibilities are turned into fixed realities, and social dreams are transformed into capitalist norms. Scenarios depicting potential social alterities become normative social realities. This paper explores how future scenarios of 'speculative design' are constructing norms of the present through imaginaries of the future.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the way reasoning about the future is infused with both imaginative time travel as well as emotion.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the way reasoning about the future is infused with both imaginative time travel as well as emotion. Insights derive from research among a Moroccan NGO active in the field of education and emerging research among a Malaysian NGO working in urban renewal, where the work of "making the world a better place" variously involves the drawing up of scenarios and the drafting of plans to realise this.

The paper approaches these efforts with an interest in social cognition, especially drawing on the concepts of "theory of mind" and "perspective taking", to understand the way collaborators imagine possible worlds. My research indicates that collaborators derive a deeper understanding of their social world through jointly making sense of the past and assembling a variety of ways of seeing the future by jointly engaging in perspective taking (i.e. taking somebody else's perspective or taking one's own future perspective). It is argued that the charting of futures is achieved in a mix of emotional investment, conscious deliberation and creative imagination. In a further step, these NGO observations shall be contrasted with a reflection on the experience of attending two contrasting world urban congresses with their respective normative constructions of doomsday and rescue scenarios.