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Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future

08 April 2025, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm

The yellow and orange setting sun.

Session seven of the Future Tense reading group, this time under the theme of 'Limits of the Future.'

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

UCL staff | UCL students

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Institute of Advanced Studies

Location

IAS Common Ground
G11, ground floor, South Wing
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

In this session, we aim to explore ideas about structural inequality. All too often, in considering the more-than-human world of the Anthropocene and the deep time of the geological past (and possible future), we erase the differences and difficulties that have been placed on certain bodies over the course of human history that limit forms of freedom and flourishing. By considering geology, we all too-often erase politics. By privileging the socio-politics of restriction, limit, and the obstacle we aim to consider the ways in which certain futures are limited through structural inequality. We aim to discuss questions such as: how do we restrict futures within society? And, how might understanding modes of restriction and limit enable us to deconstruct such barriers and construct modes of future flourishing? 

Materials (excerpts from):
Patricia Stuelke: The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Duke University Press, 2021.
Pierre Bourdieu: "The Forms of Capital," in: Education, Globalization & Social Change, edited by Hugh Lauder et al. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Gloria Ladson Billings: "Boyz to Men? Teaching to Restore Black Boys’ Childhood," in: Race Ehtnicity and Education 14, 1 (2011). 
Austin Zeiderman: "Cities of the Future? Megacities and the Space/Time of Urban Modernity," in: Critical Planning (2008).
Pierre Bourdieu & Jean-Claude Passeron: Reproduction in Education, Culture and Society. Sage, 1990.
Mark G. Kelly: "Against prophecy and utopia: Foucault and the future," in: Thesis Eleven 120,1 (2014).


This reading group is run by IAS Postdoctoral Fellows Peter Browning, Flora Sagers and Josh Weeks, and aims to provide participants with reading materials that consider the future in a multitude of different ways, and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Whether excavating the past in search of the future, considering apocalyptic understandings of the absence of a future, or thinking through the affects which are future oriented, it aims to provide a number of short extracts per session to accommodate for breadth of knowledge and disciplines and allowing for a depth in our discussions.