Short Abstract:

This laboratory creates a collaborative environment to explore how anthropologists can become active in future temporalities and places where conventionally they do not venture.

Long Abstract:

This laboratory creates a collaborative environment to explore how anthropologists can become active in future temporalities and places where conventionally they do not venture.

The future raises a series of issues for anthropology, which has been situated out of the troubled ethnographic present into the temporality of the past. Yet, do we have a moral responsibility to be mindful of and prepared for doing anthropologies that account for the future - to create an anticipatory or interventionist public or applied anthropology? How should we engage with the ways with which activists, politicians, filmmakers, designers, science fiction, and corporations imagine, perform, represent, prepare for and approach futures? And how might such collaborations or relationships be realised?

Forward play has three main foci: forwardness/futurity; action and movement; and play in its different senses - of something that involves the imagination/imaginative possibility, action/practice/participation and contingency/possibility/future etc.

The laboratory will take place during one entire day divided into four sessions.

Session 1: Provocations

Session 2: Forward Play - Instruction Workshop

Session 3: Forward Play - Practice

Group 1: Playmaking

Group 2: Group Action (moving, sensing, making)

Group 3: Finding the future in the present

Session 4: Presentations and Discussion