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Future objects: tracing the socio-material politics of anticipation

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  • The politics of making and un-making (sustainable) futures
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Abstract

This paper advances current scholarship on future practices and anticipation arguing that the ways in which we engage in future making not only rely on distinct practices but also on objects, future objects. Future objects are defined as an array of socio-material entities that underpin future practices. In drawing on science studies, this paper develops a typology of future objects that takes as its ordering mechanism the political work future objects perform. Type one future objects are solid and ready to use. Their political work is to secure the present by allowing for political agreements that concern the future. Based on a linear model of expertise, this type of future object provides answers in speaking truth to power. Bodies and instruments, databases and power points are involved when producing, as well as performing, type one objects. Type two future objects are about the experimental infrastructure for creating futures. Foresight conferences organize space with the aim in mind to come up with novel visions of sustainable futures in the Anthropocene. Finally, type three future objects are more fluid and still in the making. They are collectively worked on in iterative cycles. Examples range from prototypes of climate engineering to negotiation texts of global environmental agreements. They operate as a centering device and materialize in artifacts integrating participants contributions. In outlining the difference between the three object types, the paper elaborates on the environmental politics of anticipation especially with regard to science policy interaction.

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Notes

  1. For instance, the recently founded research platform “Future Earth” strives toward scientific integration and coordination creating policy-relevant knowledge for a sustainable future (van der Hel 2016). Policy instruments such as forecast scenarios or new participatory methods are increasingly developed across scales in which citizens develop imaginaries of the future (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016).

  2. I take my point of departure from science, a domain in which researching novelty is a defining feature as scholars of science studies have shown (Rheinberger 1997). Thus, I link the issue of future making to the question of how scientists create novelty in the laboratory. Scholars in science studies have researched how practices and objects hang together as well as how objects already embody the future in various ways.

  3. I draw on Thomas Scheffer’s (2014) notion of formative objects.

  4. I owe this point to one of the reviewers.

  5. An epistemic community is a group of professionals (often coming from different disciplines) with an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge who share a set of causal and principled beliefs, have a consensual knowledge base, and a common policy enterprise (Haas 2004).

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  1. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Alejandro Esguerra

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  1. Alejandro Esguerra
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Esguerra, A. Future objects: tracing the socio-material politics of anticipation. Sustain Sci 14, 963–971 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-019-00670-3

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