Paper short abstract:

Popular discourses on digital media often project anxieties about digital futures onto adolescents without involving them. The paper scrutinizes the mundane practices of scrolling among marginalized youths in Vienna. The research is a part of a project co-designing a serious game with adolescents.

Paper long abstract:

Popular discourses on digital media technologies oftentimes project anxieties about digital futures onto a generalized "smartphone generation". Barely any other image appears more consistently associated with digital media, than the teenager, frozen either in the extremes of "native" competence or zombie-like consumption. Their future is imagined without them, while the tech industry design practices remain obscure: the sticky screens of smartphones invite to lean forward, not to look behind the screens (Richardson 2010). The youths on the margins are rarely invited to look behind in a context where digital literacy is a privilege.

This paper examines the everyday smartphone practices among adolescents on the periphery, based on participant observations in Viennese youth centers. Design mechanisms, exemplified by the practices of scrolling the Instagram feed, are taken under scrutiny, based on the concept of the "mundane"(Pink et al. 2017) and barely visible "non-events" (Ehn und Löfgren 2010). The experiences of boredom and waiting in the context of marginalization is linked to the effortlessness of scrolling. Mundane, everyday practices exemplify the nuances of digitalized sociality and commercialization and reveal everyday inequalities, beyond simple access to the internet and digital technologies.

The presented anthropological research is part of a wider interdisciplinary project, including a cognitive and a computer scientist, thematizing the ethics of digital design through a co-designed serious game. The goal of the project is to foster transparency and an active understanding of the mechanisms behind social media and involve adolescents in the dialogue through a bottom-up design process.

Paper short abstract:

Collaborations between anthropology and speculative design could be an interesting way for anthropology to engage with imaginative practices about possible futures. Speculative design practices, however, as I will show, are not always methodologically speculative.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, I participated in a Speculative Design workshop, with the aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of Design Anthropology, where collaborations of anthropologists with speculative/critical designers in particular are not so often explored. Speculative/Critical Design (SCD) is design that does not aim to make products (not even products easier to use) but rather to open up critical discussions about the future - to imagine possible futures, to speculate about how things could be. Just like ethnography, it is a field concerned with creating questions rather than finding answers or solutions. This, however, is the discourse - the practice is full of routinized ways of making things (new) which, ironically, are not very speculative, methodologically speaking (Wilkie, Savransky and Rosengarten 2017). The aim of the workshop was to build future scenarios for pre-selected rural contexts. From the point of view of an anthropologist trying to explore how can anthropology engage with these exercises of imagination of futures, my experience was an undeniable failure. In my presentation I will narrate my frustrated attempts to contribute anthropologically to the speculative scenario that was built for a specific place. Keeping however the intuition that the collaborations between anthropology and SCD could be an interesting way for anthropology to engage with imaginative practices about different possible futures, the questions that this experience open is how to intervene in designers' methodological culture, and what are the strategies, the devices or practices for opening up methodological routines in order to speculate collaboratively?

Paper short abstract:

Writing speculative fabulations, I discuss design education, and its pedagogical approaches of learning by doing and collective imagination of transformative futures. Doing it, I propose to redesign anthropology as a special mode of collective imagination capable to point for future transformations.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I present a post-PhD research conducted by me in the Center for Research in Anthropology (CRIA), Lisbon, Portugal, from 2019. By specifying the originality which distinguishes design education, namely pedagogical approaches of learning by doing and collective imagination of transformative futures, I propose to reconsider anthropology by means of design. My hypothesis is that meshed with design, anthropology can transform itself in a social science capable of operating not only as an instrument for the understanding and critical reappraisal of social and cultural dynamics, but as a special mode of collective imagination capable of pointing to innovations and future transformations on social and cultural issues. In order to discuss these matters, I explore an innovative genre of anthropological writing, speculative fabulation, that originally combines ethnographic rigor and comparative analysis with collective imagination of transformative futures. With it, I ask questions like these: What constitutes and distinguishes design education from other educational approaches? Why can processes of reevaluation of education in design be a topic of interest to anthropology? First, because design education is organized around experimental collective practices. Students learn by doing. To learn, they need to be attentive, observing, but above all, participating, engaged in addressing issues related to the imagination of alternative futures. Even in moments of crisis, design education has not given up on these basic premises, namely, education by doing and collective imagination of transformative futures. Because of this, I believe that following these premises we can redesign anthropology education and practice.

Paper short abstract:

Anthropological intervention plays a significant role in developing the interdisciplinary digital fashion project, 'Wearing Pixels'. Participants from diverse backgrounds create multiple futures of self-expression through their everyday action, complicating the current profit driven fashion system.

Paper long abstract:

This paper introduces a future-oriented form of anthropology through designers and engineers based in Berlin, Amsterdam and Prague, actively building the digital fashion scene. Augmented reality and digital design software allow new ways of altering visual identities, such as pixels floating around the body. The actual technology to wear digital garments in daily life has not yet reached the consumer level. However, its potentials can offer alternative types of garments that can tackle environmental and ethical problems the current fashion industry generates. Multi-sited fieldwork at designers studios and tech meetups where these latent digital tools are explored, led to bridging different fields through a regular design workshop, <Wearing Pixels>. Since 2017, this workshop has been a place for a collaborative future making process. During the last three years, participants pre-felt garments from the near future through a meditation session, discussed and prototyped particular imaginations, wrote a mixed-reality fashion manifesto, and developed new terms to describe the not-yet-known concept of wearing pixels. I aim to present desires and abilities of actual practitioners, their frustrations due to the lag of technology, how different visions and circumstances collided, intertwined and eventually practiced diverse future scenarios. The anthropological research was not focused on predetermining the future, but seeing the possibilities of how technology can be used through listening to a wider range of present actions and corresponding accordingly.

Paper short abstract:

My paper explores how we may attend to the ethics, accountability, and frictions within interventionist futures anthropology in rural India. I analyze the theory and practice of an audio-visual ethnography that constituted new futures through women's radically imagined vocalities and socialities.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the theory, methodology and practice of an interventionist futures anthropology within the context of economic development in rural India, where we constantly experience friction between our concern with the dispossession of rural values (Costa 2010), and the aspirations and imaginings (Appadurai 2013) of agrarian communities. I focus on my recent audiovisual ethnography with Aaji, a lower-caste woman who had worked in the rice fields for forty years and became "Ropani" (a woman who sows paddy) every monsoon season. What began as a film project about Aaji's relationship with singing transformed into an interventionist, future-oriented project that attempted to constitute a performative space to examine the ontological and temporal politics of women's 'intangible' cultural heritage within the everyday life of the village. Aaji began to spearhead efforts to reimagine vocal traditions by bringing women of different ages and castes to sing in newly conceived village gatherings every evening. Such possibilities for interaction, place-making, filmmaking/digital archiving, and future-making directly complicate the restrictions that colonial, patriarchal, social reform, and Hindu nationalist movements have placed on the public performances of women and lower-caste people in India. I highlight the frictions that arose between stakeholders as community members of different genders, generations, and castes brought forth multiple visions of the future. Using videoclips, I hope to discuss how we may attend to the issues in accountability and ethics of interventionist anthropology, where community members are negotiating futures through radically imagined vocalities and socialities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper provides insight into an on-going PhD project that engages young Greenlandic people in collaboratively reflecting on the idea of future memories by experimenting with alternative forms of knowledge production found in design and visual anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of memory does not always need to be thought backward but as Macdonald (2013) points out, it has the potential to be "projectable into the future". On a similar note, Harrison (2012) identifies one of the main objectives of critical heritage studies to focus less on our involvement with the past and instead reflect on our relationship with the present and future. The paper touches upon these recent debates and provides insight into an on-going PhD project that engages young Greenlandic people in collaboratively reflecting on the idea of future memories.

Similar to Markham (2017) who argues that "by placing future into the equation of inquiry, we orient ourselves differently", the potential of future imagination is essential to the methodological approach of the study. By experimenting with alternative forms of knowledge production found in design and visual anthropology, the project playfully explores one leading question: "What do you want to be remembered by?". The participants are asked to contribute key artefacts from their everyday life that they consider worth preserving for future generations. In this context, the present functions as an entry point to better understand young Greenlander's relationship with the past and imaginations of the future.

In addition, the study aims at communicating the process and results of the project in the tradition of public anthropology. The online platform www.futurememorycollection.org offers hereby the possibility to engage with the research project in parallel while it is being conducted, providing access to professional and layperson alike.

Paper short abstract:

Hope having got lost in increasing swathes of the fields anthropologists have enquired into, a future-oriented anthropologist can cause difficulties for herself and others by stubbornly eliciting utopias, as I did in a post-industrial city run by communists in the north-west Peloponnese.

Paper long abstract:

Talking to people about what they want the world to be like in the future makes people make it up. Talking to people about what they want the world to be like in the future shifts the valence of how both the present and the future appear to us (the people asked and the ethnographer asking). Talking to people about what they want the world to be like in the future is an ethnographic method which complicates understandings of a given social world by infusing what is with a sense of what is (not) yet to come, and what is not yet as a theatre for fantasies whispered and collectively acted out. This can be a struggle, as it was for myself and the people I worked with in late 2010s Greece, after the economic crisis had endured for a decade already only deepening, and after the street movements and electoral project to end austerity had ended; along with many of the solidarity movements to enable social and material survival. By the time I arrived to talk about what people wanted the world to be like in the future, the future had wound up in a space doubly empty, of both the hope of capitalist progress and of the militant hope of a different array of possibilities. In this silence, ringing with the tinnitus of disappointed hope, against the grain of the future's evacuation from desire, I learned some things about utopia.

Paper short abstract:

By drawing on a long-term engagement with the transnational community of a decayed post-East Prussian country estate in Poland, this paper reflects on the surfacing of doubts and their future-making force. It traces the anthropologist's internal dialogue between can-do and must-doubt in engaging.

Paper long abstract:

While public interventions have become an increasingly accepted anthropological practice, doubts are an inherent part of the process. In this paper, I reflect on the presence and surfacing of doubts and their productive and halting force. I will bring the process of doubting into conversation with the confidence in some form doing and ask: What kind of action is doubting in public engagement and how can it be framed as part of anthropological intervention into future-making?

I am drawing on four years of my public engagement with the community of visitors, residents, and heritage activists around a decayed country estate in Northeast Poland.

The engagement begins in 2016 with an exhibition and a series of events based on my doctoral research around the socialist and post-socialist history of the manor. This first event evolves into a yearly, week-long cultural festival that gets official acknowledgement and receives public and private funding. As a substantial grant application is in preparation, these cultural activities have become a valuable asset to international heritage activists.

Doubts about the intervention, especially its sources of funding and the evolving pownership structure of the project have accompanied me since the beginning. The moral conundrums of the ruined estate, in which to position oneself include post-World War II relations between Poland and Germany, Post-Cold War social inequalities, European "Integration", regional "development" and national "progress", post-feudal, and post-Prussian nostalgia. This paper seeks a critical and self-reflexive peer-platform to discuss the empirics of doubt in the interventions of future-oriented anthropology.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the project ARTlife: Articulations of Life among Afghans in Denmark and its experiments with co-generating spaces of articulation. 'Research-through-filmmaking' is pursued in a move towards more collective work and an interventional and accountable futures anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes its point of departure in the ongoing research project: ARTlife: Articulations of Life among Afghans in Denmark' and its experiments with co-generating spaces of articulation beyond the verbal and that which can be grasped within discourse. Working towards an interventional futures anthropology, we work with 'research-through-filmmaking', akin to 'research-though-design' approaches that acknowledge the interventional, and the researcher's entwinement with that which is researched. I unpack the notions of 'collaboration' and 'workshop', pivotal in this project, and I discuss how the circulation of images in social media concretely was part of the knowledge emerging between us in the collective. I discuss how this allows for articulations of futures - different and beyond that which is delineated and foreclosed by the current political discourse - and engaging with debates about different possible futures and/or ideas for imagining better societies or socialities. Studying (in) this political landscape and media ecology - as part of a collective where things only become manifest as we go along - implies a dialectic move between strict and loose thinking: An assemblage that only stabilizes temporarily and where the researcher is always part of the assemblage interrogated (Waltorp 2020). Scholars have suggested both the inherent contingency of life and research (Irving 2017, 2018), its 'ongoingness' (Lanzéni 2017, Pink 2016) and openness (Dalsgaard and Frederiksen 2013), and advocated the move towards more collective work in a culture of the 'sole anthropologist' (Biehl and Locke 2017, Pink 2016, 2018). This paper dialogues with this work, pointing towards an interventionist and accountable futures anthropology.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to advance the conceptual discussion in a future-oriented Anthropology through examining the potentialities and limits of future as an analytical concept in the ethnographic design as well as in fieldwork. Through co-envisioning with qualified tech workers imaginaries of AI.

Paper long abstract:

Future has arrived thickly in the anthropological agenda a few years ago. It has been a useful articulator for, on one hand, open up discussions about how we do ethnography and what we ask for to a contemporary Anthropology (Salazar et al, 2017). On the other hand, to propel a new range of analysis engaged with time orientation within the discipline ( Bryant and knight, 2019). Recently the future appears to be also a challenge in the ethnographic practice (Lanzeni and Waltorp, forthcoming). In this promising context of reshaping not also the temporalities in the anthropological methods but re-visiting some epistemological orientation in the practice of ethnography (Pink, 2017) emerges the opportunity to dig into how anthropologist conceptually intervene making ethnographic alliances with our stakeholders in what we research and how we 'complicate' the imagining of shared future at stake.

Building on it, this paper aims to advance the conceptual discussion in a future-oriented Anthropology through examining the potentialities and limits of future as an analytical concept in the methodological design of ethnography as well as in fieldwork.

To do this I bring ethnographic insights from co-envisioning with qualified tech workers from different stages of the design process of Internet of Things. Focusing on/Sketching the future of market labour in technological design from the imaginary of the dramatic changes that artificial intelligence-specifically machine learning- will bring. Adapting and absorbing the evolvement of emerging technologies and the expansion of AI-assisted tools and services into other domains.

Paper short abstract:

Interventions in conflicted futures require the anthropologist to choose not only her friends, but also her enemies. This paper reflects on how these relations may affect both methodological approaches and ethnographic insights in and beyond the field.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst the notion that science can be neutral has long since been debunked, what is our relationship to those we alienate when we intervene in the making of futures with the humans and non-humans amongst whom we work? From the explicit reflections on advocacy in industrial disasters, to those of indigenous advocacy or environmental movements, there is much to learn from anthropology's current and historical interventions. But whilst we reflect much on the ethics of working with and alongside, interventionist anthropology must also reflect on the relationships we build with those we choose not to align with, whether in or beyond the field. As any attempt at intervention is nested within power imbalances, coloniality, and a range of other concerns, we must, I argue, reflect on our enemies as much as our friends.

Following my own trajectory from environmental activism to researching petroleum and advocating for indigenous rights, I discuss how a practice of bifurcation (Fortun 2001) and hybrid identities as researcher, advocate, cultural worker, 'ally' and 'enemy', enables particular conversations with actors whose views and ethics do not align with mine. Rather than a question of closed or open doors, I propose to stay with this discomfort and discuss how relations of different kinds allow for different ethnographic insights and - by extension - differently informed interventions in the work to make particular futures possible.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers anthropology's aversion to prediction in relation to its exploratory capacity to identify gaps between formulaic recipes for the remediation of complex ills and the variable contexts in which they are enacted.

Paper long abstract:

This paper consider's anthropology's aversion to prediction through an exploration of its actual and potential role in the constitution and enactment of contemporary global health challenges. Anthropology described roughly as 'medical' has long concerned itself with the persistent gaps between formulaic recipes for the remediation of complex ills and the infinitely variable contexts in which these ills emerge and evolve. Critique, however, is ineffective in the absence of engagement. A range of innovations loosely grounded in the biomedical sciences that seek to fill these gaps has meanwhile emerged, ranging from nascent disciplines such as 'Implementation Science' to methodological strategies including the 'Person-based approach' and 'guidelines for the development of complex interventions'. Drawing on experiences in multi-disciplinary international research collaborations, the papers discusses how a successful futures anthropology might engage with the predictive requirements and grounded complexities of global health.