Governing through the Future

As unknown and unknowable disasters have become an increasing concern for policy makers, new technologies of anticipation, foresight, precaution and preparedness have been developed. ‘The ever-shifting and unpredictable security environment facing the U.S. requires the constant questioning of assumptions, the asking of what-ifs, and the thinking of the unthinkable’, argued an advisory report on homeland security (Homeland Security Advisory Council, 2007). This workshop proposes an interdisciplinary exploration of the technologies that are developed to govern through the future, from environmental disasters to catastrophic terrorist attacks and from pandemics to crime.

Rather than focusing on the lessons of the past, the governance of future requires the imagination and anticipation of the unexpected. On the one hand, popular culture and representations of disasters in fiction and the media are incorporated within bureaucratised rationalities of governance. On the other, technologies of governance mobilise scientific and social scientific knowledge to explore the unknowns and uncertainties of the future. In order to explore the problematisation of the future in different fields and the forms of knowledge mobilized to ‘imagine the unimaginable’, the workshop will tackle both the technologies deployed to tame the future and the implications of these technologies for political communities and political agency.

This workshop is by invitation only.