Co-Presence and Contingency: Comics as a Methodological Innovation in Researching Automated Futures

Abstract

Recent interest in futures anthropology has argued that the discipline should play a more active role in shaping futures. However, this raises methodological problems for accessing futures and recreating the co-presence that is central to ethnography. Studying automated futures is particularly challenging because of the strong visions of technology-led futures, which rely on solutionist narratives and fail to account for everyday life. This article discusses a methodological innovation for studying automated futures through ethnographic visits, home tours, and comic strips that enable imaginative potential while drawing in the realities of everyday life and the maintenance of contingency into the future.

What Future for the Sociology of Futures? Visions, Concepts and Methods

“…While well-known Sociological methods, especially qualitative and participatory methodologies, will remain central here, the contributions in this Special Issue make the case for methods hitherto less familiar in Sociology, in particular speculative, slow, sensory and historical methods. Beyond this, the wider upsurge of interest in futures across the Humanities and Social Sciences ( New Media and Society , 2021; Qualitative Inquiry , 2022; also many articles in the journal Futures ) draws in a wider range of speculative methods (Marrero-Guillamon, 2022; Wilkie et al, 2017), Design Anthropology (Pink, 2016, 2022), creative writing (Lupton and Watson, 2022), participatory exhibition curation (Markham, 2021) and comic strips (Dahlgren et al, 2022) (for example). Detailed claims are made in each case, but the overall drive is to disrupt current practices and power relations of future-claiming and making to include marginalised voices, asking unlikely questions and visiting improbable futures (Wilkie et al, 2017).…”

Why Decenter Images of the Future Matter: Absences, Alternatives, and Accomplishments Challenging Future Visions

“…Rather than observe the “pull of the present,” “the push or the past” (Ferganani, 2020; Inuyatallah, 2008), or “the pulsion for progress” (Marx 1987), we advocate for a careful exploration of images of the future, that not just observe the elements around a temporal triangle, but the placing around systems that are implicit in the images of the future and technoscientific discourses, using the critical perspectives of STS and the creative rigors of FTS in an analytical act of resistance to centralized futures, such as hyped technological narratives (Milne, 2020; Vinsel and Russel, 2020), trendy methodological innovations (Dalhgren et al, 2022), or promising discourses that reinforce the current power dynamics of futures (e.g., French et al, 2021; Irwin, 2019).…”