Bouncing Forward: Future Narratives, Scenarios, and Transformations in the Study of Culture

Given a proliferation of crises from climate change, public health emergencies, and new threats of global war, engaging the future and probing new conjunctures of inquiry is becoming increasingly urgent. This volume enlists the cultural imagination and the study of culture specifically, asking how they can contribute to ‘bouncing forward’ from a sometimes overwhelming sense of constant change and uncertainty, rather than ‘bouncing back’ to some previous status quo as in conventional resilience-thinking. How do future concerns mobilize transformations with regard to objects of study, critical methodologies, new forms of interdisciplinarity, or questions of research and/as activism?

With a conceptual focus on narrativity, scenarios, and transformations in the study of culture, the volume addresses this question through a variety of productive lenses such as resilience-thinking, ‘imagineering’, or notions of time and risk criticism. In essence, the volume takes a two-pronged approach, demonstrating 1) how future narratives, scenarios, and transformations figure within various research objects and 2) how future challenges prompt a rethinking and recalibration of (new) conceptual and methodological apparatuses in the study of culture.