Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Kari Dahlgren
(Monash University)
Nathalie Ortar (ENTPE-University of Lyon)
Aleksandra Lis (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines the role of polarisation in shaping how futures are imagined and contested. Drawing on futures anthropologies, it calls for engaged, interventional approaches that move beyond critique and towards plural, liveable futures.
Long Abstract
Polarisation shapes how futures are imagined, contested, and come into being. Future visions are affected by competing expectations between utopian abundance and dystopian collapse, between global cosmopolitanism and nationalist retreat, and between technology as liberating humanity or as entrenching inequality. These visions circulate through media, policy, industry roadmaps, creative works, and even academic scholarship, and begin to align actors, intensify division, and make futures appear inevitable or impossible.
Too often, anthropological critiques of hegemonic visions have produced a counter-position that exacerbates this polarisation. Instead, this panel is driven by the Future Anthropologies Network’s commitment to messy, engaged, and interventional approaches. We seek to build an anthropology that does not stop at critique but actively participates in the making and shaping of futures.
We invite contributions that ask how anthropology can critically and creatively respond to polarised futures by experimenting with ways to reconfigure or open them toward plural, diverse, and more liveable possibilities.
Possible themes and topics include (but are not limited to):
• Climate Change and the energy transition: Intervening in polarised narratives of green growth versus collapse and catastrophe; unsettling job vs. the environment framings in transitioning coal, oil, gas, or industrial regions
• Technology and AI: Exploring how AI expectations and datafication clash between visions of human liberation or imminent threat, and experimenting with alternative imaginaries of ethics, technology, labour, or creativity
• Security and migration: Intervening in polarised imaginaries of borders, migration, speed and surveillance through highlighting counter-narratives, speculative methods, or community-based practices
• Automation and mobility: Exploring how automated mobilities, datafication and the MaaS generates polarised mobility scenarios around contrasting visions of resource use, technologies and power relations
• Methodological experimentation: Use of design methods, participatory scenario building, speculative fiction, VR/AR, film, or other arts-based interventions to disrupt polarised imaginaries and open plural alternatives.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The presentation discusses how the engagement with ideas and experiences of futures proposed by Brazilian Indigenous people can impact anthropological doing and its potentialities for promoting a plural commitment to the time to come.
Paper long abstract
In recent years, Brazilian Indigenous people gained global visibility by offering alternative possibilities for the future in a world merged in a time of polycrises, crossing various arenas, including debates on climate change, new technologies and multicultural societies. Despite their diversity, these Indigenous proposals share a reframing of hegemonic unilinear temporalities toward an “ancestral future” which claims for the connection of past, present and future. Based on ongoing collaborations with Indigenous people, the presentation reflects on the potentialities and challenges raised by these proposals for ethnographic experiences and educational practices. It interrogates how the commitment to such proposals of futures redefines a shared temporal experience in the field and in writing, how it reshapes the positionalities of the subject involved in the ethnographic doing, and how it affects the possibilities of realisation of collaborative experiences. It also reflects on how the inclusion of Indigenous futures not only as objects of investigation, but as proper political and epistemological tools stimulate the emergence of creative suggestions for redefining expectations, foresights, and fears in the teaching and learning of anthropology in academia. The presentation closely analyses if and how Indigenous proposals of futures can promote the emergence of innovative suggestions beyond polarised utopias and dystopias. The thesis is that the creation of a symmetric dialogue between multiple proposals of futures, anthropological and Indigenous, in ethnography and in the classroom, can incentivise a critical reflection on the collective responsibility for a shared future that is respectful of plural lives and experiences.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses visions of environmental futures and unexpected human, technological and multispecies alliances in the San Francisco Bay Area. While imagining the future is often seen as daunting amid inequality and climate risks, we show polarizations and commonalities in these scenarios.
Paper long abstract
The San Francisco Bay Area is often viewed as the cradle of two opposing futures: influential tech industry visions, on the one hand, and movements and scholars advancing social and environmental justice, on the other. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 with highly diverse research participants, this paper shows that these discourses resonate to some extent with everyday practices of futuring but also strongly deviate. In a context marked by high inequality and climate change-related risks, such as wildfires and rising sea levels, thinking about the long-term future is often seen as challenging, irrelevant, or problematic; yet people still devise scenarios.
First, from a methodological point of view, we will discuss discrepancies in futuring based on research with individuals with starkly different resources and futuring practices, involving different objects, contexts, generational, and more-than-human thinking. Second, we present scenarios that emerged from interviews despite initial scepticism concerning futuring. These environmental scenarios are often socially polarized, with strong utopian or dystopian tendencies (tech oligarchy vs. grassroots democracy, humans vs. nature, rich vs. poor, etc.); depending on the subject and scale, but they also reveal unexpected commonalities regarding anticipated fault lines and shared concerns. Understanding polarization through the lens of anticipation allows us not only to grasp possible outlooks but also to explore the commonalities and possibilities of unexpected human, technological, and multispecies alliances, which are considered key to how futures come into being.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, I will show the mining continuum between fossil fuels and renewables in Arizona. Rather than transforming production and consumption, "green" extractivism gives a second youth to capitalism. Anthropologists have a unique opportunity to step up and show this fallacy with their datas.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I will present some findings of my new research, started in October 2025 in Arizona. Based in three ethnographic fields centered around green mining and the promesses of technology to "save our planet" : 1) a future mine near the Mexican frontier digging zinc, manganese and silver; 2) a research center working on phyto-remediation of mining sites at the University of Arizona and financed by the mining industry and 3) a future datacenter in Leupp, on Indigenous land, in the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation has already suffered from a century of extractivism (oil, coal, methane, uranium) and its water rights are negotiated by different states and industries. Yet, the Navajo Nation suffers, as the state of Arizona of a severe drought, emptying its groundwater.
Rather than criticizing fossil industries and embracing green extractivism who proclaims to be the only answer to climate change, I propose to see this phenomenom as a mining continuum, painted as green and virtuous extractivism. Climate change offers an opportunity for multinational corporations to clean up their names and reputations.
Here, anthropologists -working on the ground and with the people directly impacted by these new projects, with the scientists and engineers allowing these technologies to be seen as the best and only solution- have an unique opportunity to change the narrative. In other words, to intervene and go beyond the official solutions, to show that, once again, in the name of capitalism, lands and people are sacrificed and ecosystems are destroyed.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how emerging artificial superintelligences reshape human self-consciousness at the scale of the species. It argues that AI intensifies polarisation while reopening questions of universal human values, calling for engaged anthropological interventions in future-making.
Paper long abstract
The digital world has produced a global political landscape wherein intensified interconnectivity coincides with deepening social, moral and political fragmentation. This paper explores this paradox through the emerging presence of advanced artificial superintelligences within human social worlds, asking how such encounters will transform human self-consciousness as a global species. Drawing on cosmopolitan approaches in the anthropology of the future, I examine how AI-driven systems and algorithmic decision-making uncover deep anxieties regarding the loss of human control, agency and autonomy.
Without assuming the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, intimate proximity to higher intelligences will transform our understandings of the human species as a universal community, beyond the imagined borders separating civilizations, nations and regions. A long-term existential risk envisions a collision with hegemonic autonomous agents that are misaligned with what humans value. Implications for such concerns are profoundly anthropological and epistemic, revealing fractures in how humanity conceives of itself as a collective subject.
Responding to debates on polarized futures in a context of moral pluralism, I argue for an engaged anthropology that moves beyond critique to actively intervene in the shaping of possible futures. Two interventional initiatives grounded in multispecies accounts of more-than-human entanglements are outlined: first, ethnographic studies that contribute to emergent global conversations on universal human values; and second, the creation of collaborative spaces that enable cooperation across political, geographic and institutional divides. Together, these approaches position anthropology as a critical participant in negotiating optimistic and plural paths forward in an age of intelligent machines.
Paper short abstract
This ethnography examines healthcare workers' imagined futures amid AI adoption in Australian hospitals. Developing 'daydreaming' as a conceptual device, it shows how workers articulate alternative work futures beyond polarised tech narratives, opening plural possibilities centred on care.
Paper long abstract
How do healthcare workers envision the transformation of their working lives amidst AI adoption in Australian hospitals? Whilst much scholarly attention examines how tech entrepreneurs articulate technology market dreams and nightmares, health-tech narratives of universal efficiency often rely on fictional expectations that obscure real-world clinical complexity. Drawing on futures anthropology and STS, this ethnographic research in a regional hospital examines how healthcare workers navigate professional uncertainties regarding not only technology, but what constitutes valued care, skill, and jobs. Central to this inquiry is the concept of daydreaming—developed from participants' accounts of daydreaming during work—as a device for understanding future-making. These workplace daydreams critically engage with technological hype, media imagery, and institutional ambitions. Healthcare practitioners, I argue, experience a fundamental divergence between their envisioned professional futures as workers and the technological transformation of work itself, a gap demanding scholarly attention to how technology is differently imagined across these domains. Neither utopian nor dystopian, daydreams function as imaginative techniques articulating alternative futures centred on inclusive care access, positioning healthcare workers as key agents mobilising technology for public good. Examining this divergence reveals pathways for reconciling these visions, thereby reorienting debates beyond binary tech narratives toward the contested, experiential dimensions of labour in plural, contingent technological work futures. Ultimately, attending to workers' daydreams contributes to engaged anthropological approaches that actively participate in shaping more liveable technological futures.
Paper short abstract
Children imagined hopeful post-pandemic futures. Their visions highlight agency, intergenerational responsibility, and creative, non polarized ways of thinking about future crises and shared social worlds.
Paper long abstract
This paper is based on research conducted with children during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. Younger children (aged 5–6), with use of art, craft, and narrative, imagined the post-pandemic world. Older children, aged 6–11, participated in art-based and participatory workshops that resulted, among other, in recommendations for adults in the event of future crises. Imagining the future produces knowledge about understandings of the present. At the same time, its practical dimension cannot be overlooked: it generates solutions that illuminate what kinds of worlds are thinkable.
Although the study concerned the future in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the crisis itself was not the central focus for the participants. The envisioned future was a good and safe world, one in which free action would be possible. The children also emphasized obligations and responsibilities toward a good future. The recommendations created by children for future crises may be interpreted literally, as a set of principles that could inform policy making and practical interventions. However, they may also be understood as an invitation to co-create a shared, better world.
The research proved that engaging children in constructing visions of the future makes it possible to obtain nuanced responses that diverge from polarized dystopian or utopian critiques of society. Their contributions demonstrate that creative approaches to the future are not only possible but necessary, and children can be viewed not only as the future of the societies, but predominantly as creative future makers.
Paper short abstract
Based on an anthropological study in organisations I will examine how organisational culture shapes employees’ everyday mobility practices and how co-created interventions could contribute to plural mobility futures beyond polarised narratives of sustainability.
Paper long abstract
Contemporary debates on sustainable mobility are increasingly shaped by polarised imaginaries, ranging from technological optimism versus societal collapse and individual responsibility versus structural constraint to the antagonistic framing of car drivers versus cyclists. These oppositions often render mobility futures as either inevitable or unattainable, limiting the space for meaningful intervention.
Drawing on an ongoing doctoral research project, I will present findings from an anthropological study conducted in organisations in Tartu, Estonia. Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and co-creational approach, the research examines how sustainability is perceived and embedded in daily life and how contextual factors (organisational culture, leadership practices, work arrangements, social relationships, but also work conditions and infrastructure) shape employees’ mobility practices. I approach mobility as culturally embedded and socially negotiated practice.
I will further reflect on co-creation workshops carried out with employees, in which mobility-related interventions are collaboratively designed. The workshops create a space for employees to actively shape and commit to interventions they are willing to try out, while enabling to explore what participants consider feasible, negotiable, and worth experimenting with. These workshops function as interventional sites that seek to unsettle polarised mobility imaginaries – such as car dependence versus diversified mobility practices – by foregrounding situated practices, collective negotiation, and context-sensitive possibilities.
Small-scale, relational, and experimental interventions can reconfigure polarised futures from within, offering alternatives to dominant sustainability narratives. By situating interventions within everyday organisational life, I argue that anthropology can move beyond critique and understanding alone and take an active role in shaping mobility futures.
Paper short abstract
In a French mid-mountain setting dominated by carnormativity, a group of residents promote innovative forms of active mobility. This presentation aims to document the origin and development of this initiative to question how alternative futures of mobility can be created in car dominated rural area.
Paper long abstract
In a French mid-mountain setting dominated by carnormativity, a group of residents founded in 2018 an association to promote innovative forms of active mobility. They defined the criteria for a vehicle that could remain competitive with cars in terms of journey time, protection from the weather and capacity. They developed a partnership with a regional manufacturer to jointly create a prototype that met these requirements. Thanks to public funding, the association has been running a program to test these vehicles.
Unlike industrial cars, these low-tech vehicles can be built, maintained, and repaired by their users. They involve a different approach to thermal and physical comfort. Furthermore, due to their limited energy autonomy and their poor compatibility with most of the electric charging stations, users often ask to recharge at private homes, establishing new bonds of mutual aid. This new technical object is thus giving rise to new aspirations and social relationships, as well as new skills and physical techniques.
Based on ethnographic research combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with various stakeholders in the field of territory and mobility. This presentation aims to document the conditions under which this initiative emerged, its development to date and to question how alternative mobility futures can emerge in a car dominated society.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses how futures become operational through images, metrics, and models that govern before outcomes exist, using satellite-based Earth observation as a paradigmatic case of anticipatory governance.
Paper long abstract
Polarised futures are often framed as competing visions of abundance or collapse, innovation or catastrophe. This paper argues that such polarisation cannot be understood solely at the level of discourse or imagination. Instead, futures increasingly govern through technical and institutional arrangements that render anticipated outcomes actionable before they materialise.
Drawing on ethnographic engagement with Earth observation projects, the paper treats satellite-based Earth observation not as a technological field in its own right, but as a site where futures are translated into operational formats. Metrics of climate risk, biodiversity, or resilience do not merely represent possible futures; they substitute for them in decision-making processes, underwriting audits, investments, subsidies, and regulatory interventions. In this sense, images and metrics function as operational images: they act, allocate responsibility, and legitimise decisions in the absence of realised outcomes.
The paper contributes to anthropological debates on governance, political economy, and futures by conceptualising anticipation as a governing device. It shows how anticipatory regimes redistribute responsibility by concentrating authority among those who design models, indicators, and thresholds, while shifting accountability onto actors expected to adapt to futures already formatted for them. This produces a form of responsibility without reciprocity, in which futures demand compliance but offer limited possibilities for contestation.
By analysing how futures are operationalised rather than merely imagined, the paper offers a diagnostic contribution to future-oriented anthropology. It suggests that intervening in polarised futures requires first understanding how futures already act as infrastructures of governance, shaping possibilities and foreclosing alternatives long before they arrive.