Futures thoughts with Sarah Pink

Engaged scholarship for possible futures: let’s burst the foresight bubble together

Futures thoughts with Sarah Pink

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.

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?

In this talk I imagine a cross-sectoral revision of the ways we seek to encounter and engage with possible futures. I argue 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.

Speaker

Sarah Pink (PhD, Phd hcx2, FASSA) is an award-winning futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker. Sarah is currently Laureate Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University. Previously she was Distinguished Professor and Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, and she holds Visiting Professorships at Halmstad University and University of West of England. In 2023, she was appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Technology and Society at Malmö University where she is also affiliated with the Digital Work Futures Lab.

Context

This lecture is hosted in collaboration with Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures (ICF) and their FUTURES Thoughts series. It’s also a part of Media Evolution’s Foresight and Futures lecture series. Media Evolution and ICF are collaborating in a strategic partnership to bring about more and better foresight work in the interface between academia, business, civil society and the public sector.