Paper short abstract:

A ‘reflexive anticipation’ epistemology fosters experimental research design that intervenes as it explores possible trajectories. This framework is based in ongoing experiments training youth to be critical auto-phenomenologists of social media to speculatively intervene in their own data futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports the findings of an ongoing methodology study with youth in EU and USA, where we've been teaching youth reflexive auto-phenomenology techniques to critically analyze how they engage with social media, generate various data traces, and through this process, create meaning that will be understood 10, 20, or 85 years from now as history and memory. In this paper, I focus conceptually on how our premises for inquiry influence the enactment of method and how shifting to a future making mindset can enable more conscious and reflexive research that opens up possibilities for better ethical futures. At the level of scholarship, I discuss integrating anticipation and speculation in methods of elicitation, analysis, and representation practices, so they fit better into the goal of exploring what 'could be' rather than what 'is' or 'was'. Beyond method, a 'future making' stance better recognizes that our decisions and actions have impact, whether or not we think we do. Embracing this premise enables us to shift our models from descriptive to speculative, as we both anticipate and experiment with the goal of inevitable intervention. At the level of everyday citizen activity, based on the findings of the author's study of lived experience of social media, this proactive stance of future impact can be facilitated by enabling people to become participant observers of their own lived experience, whereby they can then compile, analyze, or curate their own data with the idea of making, rather than just moving into, possible futures.