FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
FUTURES Thoughts: Engaged scholarship for possible futures

Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures (ICF) and Media Evolution warmly invites you to a FUTURES Thoughts with professor Sarah Pink titled "Engaged scholarship for possible futures – let’s burst the foresight bubble together".

A Moment of Polycrisis

Our contemporary moment is often characterised as one of polycrisis – where multiple climate, economic, technological and geopolitical crises meet. This has created an international and institutional mood of unprecedented uncertainty and a new sense of urgency to create more, scaled up and faster foresight.

Questioning Foresight

But is foresight really the answer? A lot of foresight has been delivered over the last fifty or so years, and still we find ourselves in a so-called polycrisis. The foresight solution to the polycrisis problem formula simply doesn’t work. What if there was another mode of knowing, sensing and engaging with possible futures that is more closely aligned to the human, societal and planetary worlds we co-constitute and participate in?

Rethinking How We Engage With Futures

In this talk Sarah Pink imagines a cross-sectoral revision of the ways we seek to encounter and engage with possible futures. She argues that neither academic attempts to study futures theoretically and conceptually nor participatory foresight however ethically grounded are enough. Rather, to generate viable ways of participating in shaping possible human, societal and planetary futures, we need to collaborate: to bring together the multiple modes of expert knowing, analysis and communications that we can only do together as engaged scholarship.