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.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Lure of Possible Futures: On Speculative Research, (Martin Savransky, Alex Wilkie & Marsha Rosengarten)
Part 1: Speculative Propositions
Section Introduction, (Martin Savransky, Marsha Rosengarten, Alex Wilkie)
2. The Wager of an Unfinished Present: Notes on Speculative Pragmatism, (Martin Savransky)
3. Speculative Research, Temporality and Politics, (Rosalyn Diprose)
4. Situated Speculation as a Constraint on Thought, (Michael Halewood)
Part 2: Speculative Lures
Section Introduction, (Marsha Rosengarten, Martin Savransky, Alex Wilkie)
5. Pluralities of Action, a Lure for Speculative Thought, (Marsha Rosengarten)
6. Doing Speculation to Curtail Speculation, (Alex Wilkie & Mike Michael)
7. Retrocasting: Speculating about the Origins of Money, (Joe Deville)
Part 3: Speculative Techniques
Section Introduction, (Alex Wilkie, Marsha Rosengarten, Martin Savransky)
8. Sociology’s Archive: Mass-Observation as a Site of Speculative Research, (Lisa Adkins)
9. Developing Speculative Methods to Explore Speculative Shipping: Mail Art, Futurity and Empiricism, (Rebecca Coleman)
10. Creating Idiotic Speculators: Disaster Cosmopolitics in the Sandbox, (Michael Guggenheim, Bernd Kräftner & Judith Kröll)
11.'Too Sweet to Kill' – A Contribution to the Art of Cosmopolitics, (Michael Schillmeier & Yvonne Lee Schultz)
Part 4: Speculative Implications
Section Introduction, (Martin Savransky, Alex Wilkie, Marsha Rosengarten)
12. On Isabelle Stengers’ ‘Cosmopolitics’: A Speculative Adventure, (Vikki Bell)
13. Aesthetic Experience, Speculative Thought, and Civilized Life, (Michael L. Thomas)
14. The Lure of the Possible: On the Function of Speculative, (Didier Debaise)
Afterword
15. Postscript, (Monica Greco)
