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.

Propose paper