CFP

Anticipation 22: 4th International Conference on Anticipation

Arizona State University

Tempe, AZ, United States, November 16-18, 2022

Conference website	http://anticipationconference.org
Submission link	https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=anticipation22
Submission deadline	February 24, 2022

Topics: anticipation foresight

Call for Participation

SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 24TH OF FEBRUARY: Virtual and in-person options for participation will be made available, please mark your preferences on the submission form.

The 4th International Conference on Anticipation provides an interdisciplinary meeting ground in which researchers, scholars and practitioners who are engaging with anticipation and anticipatory practices can come together to deepen their understanding and create productive new connections.

The overarching aim of the conference and of the interdisciplinary field of Anticipation Studies is to create new understandings of how individuals, groups, institutions, systems and cultures use ideas of the future to act in the present. This conference will build on prior conferences in Trento, Italy (2015, led by Roberto Poli), London, England (2017, led by Keri Facer) and Oslo, Norway (2019, led by Andrew Morrison).

This fourth conference will emphasize questions of justice. Living with intractable and ineradicable uncertainty leads humans to read the tea leaves, consult the oracle, and tell imaginative stories. Increasingly, we tend to reach for forecasting, statistical analysis and data-driven scenarios, oftentimes narrowing the production of particular types of futures. The Anticipation Conference in 2022 is devoted to opening up the study of anticipation to new voices, new spaces and new approaches.

We encourage submissions that pursue diverse topics– climate change, transitions to justice, AI, energy, poverty reduction, economic systems, health and wellbeing, innovation, food security— across a range of sectors, and embracing different disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches. We especially invite contributions that center questions of equity, fairness, diversity and inclusivity and question who imagines futures and with which impacts.

We invite proposals that speak to the following themes and questions, intended to encourage conversations between researchers, practitioners and scholars addressing anticipatory phenomena and practices in different ways. The formats provided offer openings for emerging and challenging ideas and ways to communicate them creatively and critically. We invite papers, curated sessions, techniques workshops and new ideas sessions with more information below on formats.

Themes

1. Public Futures

How can futuring and anticipation be a shared public good?

How are spaces for public anticipation being designed and implemented? Who is centered and excluded from these?

How can communities be empowered to create and act on their own futures?

What impedes and enables engagement with plural futures?

What are the best mechanisms for nurturing a broad societal capacity for anticipation?

2. Politics, Justice and Ethics of Anticipation

How is power wielded, shared, transferred or negotiated in anticipatory practices?

How do anticipatory regimes produce and/or reimagine governance?

How do the political dimensions of anticipation promote or impede progress towards more just futures?

Which worldviews, principles or practices are involved in ethical– and unethical– anticipations?

3. Decolonizing Anticipation

What do the flows of knowledge on anticipation between the global north and the global south look like?

How is anticipation connected to emancipation, revolution, activism and social movements?

What methodological and ontological perspectives are opened up through indigenous futuring?

How do different cultures, religions and traditions anticipate? What can ethnography, sociology, comparative studies, regional studies, and other disciplines show us about cultural variations of anticipation?

4. Critical Anticipatory Capacities

How do community and organizational infrastructures promote futures thinking and anticipatory capacity building?

What is the role of emotion– delight, serendipity, surprise, anxiety, dread and wonder– in anticipatory thinking and practice?

Which forms of literacies buttress anticipatory capacities?

What is the role of educational institutions in fostering capacities for anticipation and for critique of anticipatory work?

5. Creativity, Innovation and New Media

What creative, artistic, design-based and avant-garde approaches are in play?

How can new media, VR/AR, immersive experience design and games be deployed to activate better futures?

What is the interaction between the analogue and digital, the live and virtual in anticipatory practice and foresight?

What media and IT systems are being used to create future narratives, and what types of affordances, limitations and trade-offs do they enfold?

6. Time & Temporalities

How can temporality studies problematize and pluralize anticipatory practices?

How is temporality understood at different scales and by different disciplines?

How does temporality impact governance and justice?

What are the histories of the future? Which concepts and practices help us to use the past to inform alternative futures?

What is the role of intergenerational dialogue in anticipation?

7. Also You!

Despite (or perhaps because of!) a chaotic organization of disciplines, intellectual histories, professional practices, Anticipation Studies has an ethos of freeing up the possibility space. We encourage new-comers and those who do not neatly fit in categories! Therefore, we are also open for surprise and want to be inclusive. If you do not see your scholarship or practice in these themes, send us your ideas. We want to hear from you!

Formats

To inspire interactivity and inclusion, whilst maximizing the conviviality of being in the same place at the same time, the following formats are available:

Curated Sessions

These 90 minute sessions are intended to share new knowledge and generate interdisciplinary discussion. These sessions should address one (or more) of the questions outlined above and actively involve a number of different disciplines. Session Curators should gather 3-4 others to co-create a cohesive session, designed to be interactive.

We are keen to encourage more diverse formats in these curated sessions. They might include, for example, a participatory experience that invites embodied exploration of different concepts or practices of anticipation; a symposium of four papers and a discussant; a set of multiple inputs of different forms, designed to elicit conversation and reflection; a guided walk with place-based interventions. The remit is to facilitate deep conversation and reflection amongst the conference participants. The choice of format lies with the Session Curators.

Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: an abstract outlining the substantive issues to be explored in the session and how these relate to the conference themes, a summary of the format being proposed (as well as any specific technical/space requirements where necessary), a (short) summary of the contributions of each of the curators as well as of any underlying research, scholarship or practice upon which the session is based, and details for the main person to contact.

Paper Sessions

You can also submit a paper which will be organized into similar themes by the conference committee and discussed collectively in a chaired session. Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: an abstract outlining the substantive issues to be explored in the paper, a discussion of how the paper relates to the existing research, literature and/or practice in the field, and the connection with conference themes.

New Ideas Sessions

These sessions offer a space for participants to share emerging research, theories or ideas that may not yet be ready for a full paper session. Participants will have 5 minutes to share their ideas, with 5 minutes reserved for discussion and feedback. Proposals should be of no more than 500 words and should include: an abstract outlining the emerging ideas to be discussed, the desired feedback, and how these ideas relate to the current state of the field and conference themes.

Techniques Workshops

These sessions are designed to enable practitioners and researchers to test out or share new techniques in the practice or study of anticipation. These are hands-on experiences with high levels of interactivity explicitly designed to garner feedback to improve the approach. Workshop Organizers will specify either 30 or 90 minutes for the workshop and indicate the maximum number of participants. Proposals should be of no more than 1000 words and should include: details of the processes and format of the session, the intellectual or artistic foundations of the workshop, and the nature of participant experience. Workshop Organizers will be expected to provide their own materials (but should indicate any special technical or space requirements).

Key Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline – ~~15 February 2022~~ 24 February 2022

Notification of Acceptance – 18 March 2022

Conference in Tempe, Arizona – 16-18 November 2022

Venue

The conference will be held on the Arizona State University Tempe campus in the Sonoran Desert. The area offers a wide range of accommodation options, from budget to five star resorts and is easily accessible via light rail from Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport.

Place Based and Virtual Options

Our pandemic creates much uncertainty and inspires new ways to connect. We really want to host an in-person gathering this November in Arizona, yet our ultimate goal is to create a safe and convivial space for joint exploration and learning. Inclusivity is critical.

When you submit your abstract to participate in the conference, we ask that you mark your preferences for an in-person and/or virtual event. As we learn more about you and as conditions evolve, we will adaptively design an experience as thoughtfully and fairly as possible. We plan on offering a virtual option for participation in addition to the in-person event 16-18th of November.

Keynote Speakers

Laura Forlano

Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. Over the past ten years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices and the future of work; and, computational fashion, smart textiles and wearable medical technologies. She is an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Aarathi Krishnan

Aarathi Krishnan specializes in strategic and applied foresight for the humanitarian and development sector. A seasoned expert globally, she works at the intersection of humanitarian and development futures, strategic foresight, and anticipatory institutional transformation. She is currently the Strategic Foresight Advisor for UNDP, where she is designing the integration of a systems approach to foresight across the Asia Pacific Bureau to build anticipatory capacities, decision making and programmatic offers to see, manage and respond to short and long term risk signals, policies and investments so that development futures can be flourishing for all. In addition, she is also an Affiliate at Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University as well as a 2020-21 and 2021-22 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Carr Centre for Technology and Human Rights. The focus of her research is on Foresight and Decolonial Tech Ethics in Humanitarian Tech Governance Previously she has supported a range of international humanitarian organisations on embedding institutional foresight and global strategy to drive institutional and systems transformation, including the UN Resident Coordinators, UNV, the World Bank, UNHCR, MSF, ICRC and IFRC . Twitter: @akrishnan23 and www.aarathikrishnan.com

Deji Bryce Olukotun

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of two novels and his fiction has appeared in five different book collections. His novel After the Flare won the 2018 Philip K. Dick special citation, and was chosen as one of the best books of 2017 by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Syfy.com, Tor.com, Kirkus Reviews, among others. His short story Between the Dark and the Dark, published in Lightspeed, was selected by editor Diana Gabaldon for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He currently works for the audio technology company Sonos and he is a Future Tense Fellow at New America.

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti

Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti holds a Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change, at the Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is also the interim director of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Drawing on different critiques of colonialism and human exceptionalism, her research examines the interface between historical, systemic and on-going forms of violence, and the material and existential dimensions of unsustainability within modernity. Vanessa is one of the founding members of the Gesturing Decolonial Futures Collective (decolonialfutures.net) and the author of “Hospicing Modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism”.

Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui

Chief Ninawa Inu Huni Kui is a hereditary Chief and also elected president of the Federation of the Huni Kui people of Acre. He represents more than to 16,000 people, in 118 villages, along 7 rivers of the Amazon basin. Chief Ninawa is a sharp critic of false solutions to the climate crisis and a strong advocate for placing Indigenous voices and rights at the center of the climate agenda.

Heila Lotz-Sisitka

Heila Lotz-Sisitka is a Distinguished Professor at Rhodes University, and holds a Tier 1 South African National Research Foundation Chair in Transformative Social Learning and Green Skills Learning Pathways at Rhodes University in South Africa. Her research interests include critical research methodologies, transformative environmental learning, agency, and education system transformation.

Optional Field Trips

With enough interest, we will organize field trips to

Arcosanti on 11/15/2022 (fee for shared transport and tour)

Biosphere 2 11/15/2022 (fee for shared transport and tour)

Emerge Festival in Mesa 11/19/2022 (no fee, participants self-organize local transport)

Conference Organizing Committee

Local Organizing Committee is composed of Cynthia Selin, Lauren Keeler, Malka Older, Ruth Wylie, Alexandrina Agloro, Elma Hajric

Scientific Committee

Andrew Morrison, Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Annalee Newitz, Freelance journalist, Writer

Ângela Guimarães Pereira, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission

Armin Grunwald, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS)

Chris Groves, Cardiff University

Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University

David Guston, Arizona State University

Denisa Kera, University of Malta

Ed Finn, Arizona State University

Emily Spiers, Lancaster University

Erica Bol, European Commission

Genevieve Lively, University of Bristol

George Wright, University of Strathclyde Glasgow

Jathan Sadowski, Monash University

Jeroen van der Sluijs, University of Bergen

Johan Siebers, University of Middlesex

Keri Facer, University of Bristol

Kwamou Eva Feukeu, UNESCO

Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design

Lauren Keeler, Arizona State University

Lydia Garrido Luzardo, UNESCO Chair on Sociocultural Anticipation and Resilience

Manuela Celi, Latin American Network Politecnico di Milano

Marta Berbes, University of Waterloo

Mauricio Mejía, Arizona State University

Michael Bennett, Discovery Partners Institute

Per Dannemand Andersen, Technical University of Denmark

Peter Bishop, Teach the Future

Rafael Ramirez, University of Oxford, Saïd Business School

Roberto Poli, UNESCO, University of Trento

Ron Kassimir, Social Science Research Council (SSRC)

Scott Smith, Changeist

Stuart Candy, Carnegie Mellon School of Design

Susan Cox-Smith, Changeist

Susan Halford, University of Bristol

Tanja Hichert, Hichert & Associates

Ted Fuller, University of Lincoln

Tom Chermack, Colorado State University

Yoshi Saijo, Kochi University of Technology

For more information, please see our website: http://anticipationconference.org