Anthropology of Futurity

Catalog description

How should we think about the future amid worlds on edge? What is an inevitable versus a contingent course of events? What role do humans and non-humans, machines, animals, and plants play as agents of futurity in the context of the Anthropocene? This seminar explores these pressing questions, linking multiple sources of knowledge production—biological, medical, ecological, engineering, economic, and anthropological—with manifestations of the future. It starts with the basic premise that futures are made, molded by competing material, economic, and creative desires and possibilities, and not foreordained. Innovating futures also entails unexpected ethical and technical entanglements that current forms of knowledge cannot always anticipate. Drawing from readings in anthropology, the social studies of science and technology, Indigenous studies, as well as from engineering, AI, and scientific journals and films, we explore tensions between knowledge and uncertainty on the one hand, and ethics and innovation on the other. With these tensions in mind, we consider the myriad of agents whose role will be vital to shaping planetary futures—as well as how alternative futures, especially among communities confronting systemic inequalities and colonial and race-based injustices, are imagined and realized. From the climate crises to the ongoing pandemics, militarization, and mass migrations that have torn apart social fabrics, we will learn to become ‘technologists of the future’—that is, individuals and collectives with the tools to realize more inclusive, flourishing, and just futurities.