Paper short abstract:

This paper explores absence as a speculative mode of investigation in futures-focused ethnographic research and considers how the magic of absence might help us imagine emergent technologies operating between the magical and the mundane.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores absence as a speculative mode of investigation in futures-focused ethnographic research. In particular, it considers how the magical labour of absence can help us imagine technologies that do not yet exist. In the vein of critical autoethnography, the paper discusses the author's experiences of grief following the death of her absent father and her encounter with the magic of absence saturated with personal loss, memory, identity, and hopes for the impossible. The author recounts how her search for a past that never was led her to envision new technologies (i.e. smart technologies, medical technologies, cyborg and human enhancement technologies, and web mapping/navigation technologies) operating between the possible and the impossible and the past and the future. Weaving in threads of the author's diaries, poems, short stories, and fieldnotes with archival research and analysis of the social and political conditions of her home country of Poland, the paper considers the intricate ways that our technological futures are made and remade through the fears, longings, and hopes of personal and social absences. Finally, the paper argues that absence must be taken seriously as an ethnographic method, as it might help us research and intervene in technological futures by challenging the dualities of the magical and the mundane and, ultimately, the very categories of absence and presence.