CfP: Imagining the History of the future: unsettling scientific stories University of York
Recent
years have seen a significant growth of academic and public interest in
the role of the sciences in creating and sustaining both imagined and
enacted futures. Technological innovations and emergent theoretical
paradigms gel and jolt against abiding ecological, social, medical or
economic concerns: researchers, novelists, cartoonists, civil servants,
business leaders and politicians assess and estimate the costs of
planning for or mitigating likely consequences. The trouble is that
thinking about the future is a matter of perspective: where you decide
to stand constrains what you can see
With
confirmed plenary speakers Professor Sherryl Vint (University of
California, Riverside, USA) and Professor Charlotte Sleigh (University
of Kent, UK) this three-day conference will bring together scholars,
practitioners, and activists to explore ways in which different visions
of the future and its history can be brought into productive dialogue.
Focused
on the long technological 20th century (roughly, 1887-2007) and looking
particularly at the intersections between fictional/narrative
constructions of the future, expert knowledge and institutional policy
development, the themes of the conference will include but are not
limited to:
· The
relationship between lay and expert futures, especially futures
produced by communities marginalised in public dialogue by ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, species or political orientation
· How
have different forms of fiction (novels, films, games, comics) created
different visions of what’s to come? How have their audiences responded
to and shaped them?
· The
role of counterfactuals/alternate histories, as well as factional
accounts and popular science: how have different forms of writing
positioned the future?
· What’s
the relationship between past and present scenario planning in
government or commerce? How have they fed into wider cultural
conceptions of impending developments?
· Disciplinary
influences: how have different academic disciplines – sciences,
humanities, arts, social sciences – fed into developing futures? Has
this changed over time?
· The
role of futures past: how can we recover them, and what do they tell us
about futures present? What are the forgotten or marginalised sites of
future-making?
· How
have different themes – time, the apocalypse, the individual, among
others – changed over the last century of future-thinking?
We
invite proposals based broadly on these themes. Individual papers
should take the form of 20 minute presentations, but we would also be
delighted to consider three or four paper panel submissions on a related
topic, workshops or round-table discussions.
Proposals
for individual papers should include an abstract of no more than 250
words, together with a short (100) word author bio. Panel proposals
should also include a short (150 word) commentary on the overall theme.
Please email proposals to unsettling-science@york.ac.
This
is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded event, run by the
Unsettling Scientific Stories project based at the Universities of York,
Aberystwyth and Newcastle.
Further information can be found here: http://unsettlingscientificst