Paper short abstract:

I analyze how scenarios express new modalities of knowledge-making and practicing for future uncertainties in the energy world and how new modes of subjectivity are designed, encouraged to accept the uncertainty of the future and work with it through imagination, narration, and simulation.

Paper long abstract:

Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, and particularly with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or prepare for and guard against undesirable eventualities. In this paper, addressing he problematization of the different ways in which people conceptualize and act on uncertain futures, I shed light on one particular technology for systematically thinking, envisioning, and preparing for future uncertainties, that of the scenario. The scenario emerged in recent decades to become a widespread means through which states, large corporations, and local organizations imagine and prepare for the future. Regardless of the different ways in which scenarios are created and used, various iterations of the scenario technology all share a common approach to thinking and practicing potential futures: they narrate imagined stories about the future that are intended to help people move beyond their 'mental blocks' to consider the 'unthinkable.'Drawing on a long-term fieldwork project conducted at one of the world's leading energy organizations, I describe how future "global scenarios" are created and implemented in the energy world. In this process, I argue not only new modalities of knowledge-making and practicing are shaped, but also new subjects and modes of subjectivity are designed, and encouraged to accept the uncertainty of the future and work with it through the creation of a new language and new frameworks for addressing it.

Paper short abstract:

In public schools, promises that educational credentials are devices that effectively reduce future uncertainty and deliver better futures of upward social mobility are widely circulated, yet, they might take the form of different and sometimes conflicting temporalities.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between education and future is growingly taken for granted. Beliefs that educational credentials are devices that effectively reduce future uncertainty and deliver better futures of upward social mobility are widely circulated in institutional and non-institutional settings. In the deindustrialised city of Concepción, in southern Chile, in particular, pervasive unemployment and credentialism have increasingly created anxieties in relation to the need for further education in order ‘to have a future’ and ‘to become somebody in life’ amongst young people and their families. At public (state) schools, these promises might take the form of different and sometimes conflicting temporalities. The school makes meritocratic promises in the form of the ‘future perfect’ tense: a predictable and continual progression by which the desired ‘objects’ of hope will certainly become achieved. In comparison to this forward-facing development, teachers considered students that are not interested (or seemed not to be interested) in education as being present-oriented and lacking long-term future temporal orientation. Instead, young people strategise and orient towards the future according to the grammatical metaphor of the ‘future conditional’: they orient towards certain goals, often educational, but they understand that their aspirations are contingent on volatile economic and political landscapes that often work against them. The specific temporal philosophy of contemporary schooling has been heightened by the creation of educational markets and an understanding of education as an individual investment that challenges ideas of public education as a common good.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation critically appraises science-fictional and technological tropes regarding prospective applications such as exoskeletal devices in armed forces and emphasizes the dangers, risks and vulnerability forms in using these categories about the corporeal realities in military field.

Paper long abstract:

Some years ago, Dr. Michael Goldblatt, former Director of Defense Sciences at the DARPA noted the following: ““Imagine soldiers having no physical limitations … […] Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitations will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future … Metabolically dominant warfighters of the future will be able to keep their cognitive abilities intact, while not sleeping for weeks … And contemplate, for a moment, a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts as convenient as a fast food drive-thru” (Goldblatt 2002, quoted in Malet 2015: 319).

Such narratives describing humans endowed with superpowers and deliberately advancing enhanced bodies and minds remain currently far from any facts. What they encourage is rather a promising discourse relying on a fictional imaginary conceived to hide deep vulnerability and “dehumanizing” (Dobos 2020: 27 ff) techniques in the armed forces. Following ethnographic fieldwork and expert and narrative interviews with staff working for and within armed forces, I will question the production of “Iron Men” and some of their technologies of imagination: exoskeletons. My intention is to discuss the discrepancy between the futures promised by narratives of enhanced soldiership, in which exoskeletons along with AR and VR play an essential role, and emphasize the dangers, risks and vulnerability forms in using these categories around and about the corporeal realities in armed forces.