Full Description
Is another future possible? So called 'late modernity' is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social-natural, techno-scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.
Contents
Introduction 1. The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research Part 1: Speculative Propositions
Section Introduction 2. The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism 3. Speculative Research, Temporality and Politics 4. Situated Speculation as a Constraint on Thought Part 2: Speculative Lures Section Introduction 5. Pluralities of Action, a Lure for Speculative Thought 6. Doing Speculation to Curtail Speculation 7. Retrocasting: Speculating about the Origins of Money Part 3: Speculative Techniques
Section Introduction 8. Sociology's Archive: Mass-Observation as a Site of Speculative Research 9. Developing Speculative Methods to Explore Speculative Shipping: Mail Art, Futurity and Empiricism 10. Creating Idiotic Speculators: Disaster Cosmopolitics in the Sandbox 11.'Too Sweet to Kill' - A Contribution to the Art of Cosmopolitics Part 4: Speculative Implications Section Introduction 12. On Isabelle Stengers' 'Cosmopolitics': A Speculative Adventure 13. Aesthetic Experience, Speculative Thought, and Civilized Life 14. The Lure of the Possible: On the Function of Speculative Afterword 15. Postscript
