Routledge Handbook of Social Futures

Description

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques – forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production– to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere. Contents List of tables and figures Editors List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Why social futures? • Carlos López Galviz and Emily Spiers 1 A beginning: A critical history of scenarios • Andrew Curry 2 Agency: Futures literacy and Generation Z • Emily Spiers 3 AI: The social future of intelligence • Richard H.R. Harper 4 Anticipation: Flourishing for the future • Christopher Groves 5 BioFutures: Where futurists and biologists meet • Derek Gatherer 6 Borders: Retravelling Nickelsdorf • Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel 7 Climate change: Transformational adaptation in Bangladesh • Riadadh Hossain, Shababa Haque and Saleemul Huq 8 Collaboration: Collaborative future-making • Kristina Lindström, Per-Anders Hillgren, Ann Light, Michael Strangeand Li Jönsson 9 Data: The futures of personal data • Deborah Lupton 10 Ecology: Thinking futures ecologically • Lauren Rickards 11 Economics: Catalysing large-scale system change • Stewart Wallis 12 Family: Homeland connections and family futures • Earvin Charles Cabalquinto 13 Higher education: The future university • Carl Gombrich and Ashley Jay Brockwell 14 Inquiries: Healthcare futures • Dawn Goodwin and Richard Tutton 15 Lines: Material cultures of future mobility • Nicola Spurling 16 Literary futures: How fiction can help policy makers • Rebecca Braun 17 Mental health: What can social futures teach us? • Liz Brewster 18 Mobility justice: Sustainable mobility futures • Mimi Sheller 19 Multi-planetary worlds: Mobilities of the space age • Katarina Damjanov 20 Narrative: Telling social futures • Genevieve Liveley 21 Postcolonial futures: Urban eventualities • AbdouMaliq Simone 22 Prospection: Producing social futures • Barbara Bok and Ted Fuller 23 Publics: Infrastructuring proto-futures • Georgia Newmarch 24 Queering: Liberation futures with Afrofuturism • Lonny J Avi Brooks, Jason Tester, Eli Kosminsky and Anthony D. Weeks 25 Smart cities: Policy without polity • Paul Graham Raven 26 Urbanism: Creating urban futures • Cecilia Dinardi 27 Utopia: Futurity, realism and the social • Lisa Garforth 28 Visible cities: Envisioning social futures • Nick Dunn 29 Walking futures: Following in the footsteps of mobility pioneers • Farzaneh Bahrami Index