Embrace the opportunity to be part of the 5th International Conference on Anticipation, taking place from September 11th to 14th, 2024, at Lancaster University in the UK. This conference serves as an open, convivial, and interdisciplinary forum, inviting scholars, practitioners, researchers, and citizens to engage in the fields of anticipation and future studies. The goal is to deepen and broaden the exchange of new ideas, fostering reflection and action for a better collective global future.
Conference Overview
Anticipating the challenges, opportunities, and conditions of future change requires a global and local perspective, intertwined with both universal and particular values. The conference emphasizes the importance of context and invites participants to explore the unique conditions of the first quarter of the 21st century. It recognizes that the understandings, framings, skills, imaginaries, and means of instigating positive change for future generations differ from those currently accessible.
Building on the success of previous conferences, this event encourages submissions that utilize anticipation to engage with critical global issues such as the climate emergency, transitional justice, AI and ethics, energy security, social inequalities, public health, socio-technical systems, cultural values, activism, and the right to protest.
Key Themes
Social Futures: Exploring the contextual nature of futures, considering geography, history, and the balance between present and future possibilities guided by values and desires for the collective benefit.
Environmental Crises and Societal Change: Investigating how anticipation can counter apocalyptic visions caused by the climate emergency and foster relationships between environments, societies, individuals, and politico-economic systems.
Decolonising Futures: Understanding the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial systems and their impact on our capacity to anticipate open plural futures, focusing on reparation, generational trauma, and historical maps.
Past Futures and Generational Ancestries: Examining the archives influencing anticipations and exploring how to use them to become better ancestors, drawing lessons from past generations for sustaining relationships between humans and their environments.
Storytelling, Imagination, and the Right to Anticipate: Identifying new narratives that can inspire anticipatory action, challenge the status quo, and bridge the gap between storytelling and real-world constraints.
Timelines, Timescapes, and Timespans: Addressing the challenge of integrating diverse temporal scales, from human lifespans to geological processes, in developing a comprehensive temporal literacy.
Ideas of the Future Informing Action in the Present: Investigating the implicit ideas of the future shaping everyday lives, institutional values, ideological strategies, and political directions.