Sylvie Mazzella & François Dumasy, Revue Émulations, "Studying futures in the humanities and social sciences: anticipations, foresight and scenarios".

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Antoine Dolez, Sylvie Mazzella (ed.), Studying futures in the humanities and social sciences: anticipations, forecasts and scenariosÉmulations, no. 47, 2024.

With the participation of François Dumasy.

Summary:

The issue is based on the observation that there is a proliferation of practices, knowledge and technologies aimed at thinking about our collective future. While the need to imagine the future of our societies is not unique to the present day, there are two important dimensions that seem to characterise our era. On the one hand, the Anthropocene - the new geological period we have entered - is overturning our concept of time. On the other hand, the capacity and legitimacy to think about the future are now widely shared by a growing number of actors and institutions, structured around new professions and experts and new knowledge and technologies, which form a kind of market for the production of anticipations.

The aim of this issue is to shed light on the difficulties faced by the humanities and social sciences in taking up this subject - futures and foresight - which has long been sidelined, while inviting them to analyse anticipations as social, political and technical objects.

The contributions in this issue take up this challenge by documenting this object of analysis. Based on empirical case studies, they highlight the actors, professions and institutions that produce foresight from above, and they also shed light on the production of foresight from below by considering it at the heart of the social and political activities of citizens. Taken as a whole, the research presented contributes to a critical and epistemological reflection on the production of foresight.

Link to the online issue

(available in English and French)

Table of contents :

Antoine Dolez and Sylvie Mazzella

The Anthropocene and the crisis of time: too many futures or "? No Future " ? [Full text]

Tonya Tartour and Jean-Paul Gaudillière

Regimes of anticipation in the context of a pandemic. Controversies concerning children and the French response to Covid-1e [Full text]

François Dumasy

Imagining the future of the Regency of Algiers in the 1830s: the role of African army officers and intendants in justifying colonisation [Full text]

Goubert Anna

The factory of the future [Full text]

Cecilia Pasini