Energies and Technologies Futures

Call for proposal

For over a century, predictions about the future have been dominated by technological fantasies, either with utopian or dystopian outcomes. Driven increasingly by responses to the causes and effects of climate change, popular political future imaginaries span elitist extraplanetary survivalism and back-to-the-land minimalism. Anthropologists have emphasised the social and material forms of technology, and the need to analyse and account for visions of the future and attend to socio-material relations between technologies, humans and other living beings in a shared environment.

FAN explores the anthropological potential for future-oriented methodologies, while EAN generates knowledge on approaches energetic practices of various kinds. This workshop brings these two concerns together, to generate synergies, theoretical trajectories and newly shared research agendas. Where do energy and technology futures intersect? How are human futures implicated in diverse techno-energetic visions? What alternative other human futures are possible in the current techno-energetic world than those extremes delineated above of extraplanetary survivalism and back-to-the-land minimalism? How can anthropologists account for- and intervene- and take part in forging in futures-generation?

The aim is to demonstrate that two relatively new areas of anthropological research and practice can work together to consolidate an agenda for research and intervention. It seeks to both impact on the theory and methodology of the discipline and to advance an anthropological approach to energy futures in an interdisciplinary research field.

Deadline for abstract submission: April 15^th 2019

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