Research & Initiatives

The major goal of this research project is to publish two programmatic manifestos in book form – The Poetics of the Future respectively The Pragmatics of the Future – which include both theoretical analysis and the practical tackling of futures by looking at experiences of the past and their enactments in present times.

 

Both publications combine the down-to-earth approach from the edited volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986, University of California Press) and the hopeful visionarism from The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020, Orbit). Each of the five investigators participating in this research project will contribute to every volume with an own paper of ca. 12.000-15.000 words in English.

 

Thinking about the future has its own particular set of challenges: on the one hand, the current world does not offer many reasons for optimism, with historical paradigms such as democracy and capitalism crumbling under their own weight without valid alternatives emerging from the chaos of imploding modernities; on the other hand, hoping for a better future for our children and for their children is a fundamental mechanism in humans' perception, processing and modulation of the time and space, so that the innate drive for belonging, compassion and nurturing runs counter whatever fears and blockades our biology might bring up from the depths of our millennia-old development. To this outcome, at The Loving Futures Laboratory, we strive for a balanced scholarly adventure to combine courage and perseverance, hard-work and joy, towards a better tomorrow for as many of us as possible.