Call for Papers | ‘Bouncing Forward: Future Narratives, Scenarios, and Transformations in the Study of Culture’ – ESSCS and TransHumanities Joint Summer School

Call for Papers | ‘Bouncing Forward: Future Narratives, Scenarios, and Transformations in the Study of Culture’ – ESSCS and TransHumanities Joint Summer School
Submission: bouncingforward@gcsc.uni-giessen.de
Submission deadline: 10 February 2023
Conference Dates: 19-23 June 2023
Conference Location: Justus Liebig University Giessen, International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)

Engaging the future is never more pressing than in uncertain times with a sense of no future. Hence concern with the future has become increasingly urgent in our own times, marked as they are by a proliferation of crises and existential challenges. Complex prospects of climate change, global health challenges and inequalities, precarious migration, erosion of trust, and new threats of nuclear war run parallel with sounding out new conjunctures and futures of cultural inquiry (cf. Grossberg 2010, Bachmann-Medick/Kugele/Nünning 2020). Part of the challenge lies in charting and navigating a world of non-linear, multi-agential complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Any number of practitioners, pundits, and disciplines are engaged in developing scenarios and in envisaging transformations to contain “future shocks” (Alvin Toffler) that are already being felt today (cf., e.g., Epstein 2012, Heffernan 2020, Kahane 2012). What do the cultural imagination and the study of culture bring to this debate, especially if we consider the future not only or primarily in terms of techno-industrial promises, but as “cultural fact” (Appadurai 2013)? How can they contribute to assessing and ‘bouncing forward’ – rather than ‘bouncing back’ to some previous status quo, as in conventional resiliencethinking – from a sometimes overwhelming sense of constant change and uncertainty? How do these concerns influence and shape trajectories and transformations within our field of research, i.e. the study of culture, e.g. with regard to objects of study, methodology, (new forms of) interdisciplinarity, or questions of research and/as activism? How have earlier periods and intellectual constellations reacted to uncertain futures, with which visions of dystopia or utopia that we can turn to as historical precedent or ‘histories of the future’? How can we apply forward thinking as a “conceptual exercise to shed light on the present and anticipate political struggles over the future” (Loloum 2020: 307)? Given the existing dissimilarities and inequalities between, e.g., the global South and North, how can we come to terms, conceptually and epistemologically, with the vast differences in the temporality, emergency, and scale of ‘future’ narratives and scenarios?