Critical Future Studies - A thematic Introduction

Abstract

Our 2017 essay “Beyond Capitalist Realism – Why We Need Critical Future Studies” (Goode & Godhe 2017), published in this journal, was intended as both a provocation and an invitation to scholars concerned with the ways in which cultural texts not only represent the future, but also actively shape it by opening up or closing down imaginative possibilities. The essays collected in this special section are both responses to our invitation and provocations in their own right. From our point of view, they each take Critical Future Studies forward and collectively augur well for the further development of this field. This introductory essay contains three sections. First, we briefly situate Critical Future Studies within an intellectual and historical context. In the following section we discuss some relevant scholarship published very recently in cognate fields (specifically Anticipation Studies and Sociology) and which are pertinent to Critical Future Studies as a developing field of study. In the final section, we introduce the articles contained in this this special section: six diverse contributions on topics including green capitalism, artificial intelligence and automation, science fiction, post-scarcity societies and the future of work, and socialist futures.