Reading Group: Future Tense. Languages of the Future

This session focuses on the ways in which the future is made and remade, pre-and re-figured in the here and now by adopting an ethnographic lens. The session explores understandings of the future as rooted in praxis. As such, these apprehensions of the future-in-the-present call for an attention to the political-economic and socio-cultural conditions in which the futures are enacted. What’s more, an ethnographic approach opens up the possibility to consider competing future projects and understand the ways in which these are unequally distributed. 

Materials (excerpts from):
Pierre Bourdieu: "The Forms of Capital," in: Education, Globalization & Social Change, edited by Hugh Lauder et al. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà & Miguel Pérez-Milans: Introduction. Re-imagining Language and Communication in Collaborative Projects: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Future. Routledge, 2025
Peter Browning, P. (in press) ‘“La vida es una repetición hasta que nosotros cambiemos”: Imagining and materialising the future of Rionegro, Colombia with English," in: Re-imagining Language and Communication in Collaborative Projects: Ethnographic Perspectives on the Future, Garrido Sardà, M. R. & Pérez-Milans, M. Routledge, (to appear in autumn 2025).
Luisa Martin Rojo: "Taking over the square: The role of linguistic practices in contesting urban spaces," in: Journal of Language and Politics, 13, 4 (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.