Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This head volume of the ´Narrating Futures` series defines and identifies Future Narratives. It parses their characteristic features and aims at an abstract classification of the whole corpus, irrespective of its concrete manifestations across the media. Drawing on different theorems and approaches, it offers a unified theory and a poetics of Future Narratives. Locating the media-historical moment of their emergence, this volume paves the way for the following volumes, which deal with how Future Narratives are refracted through different media.

Future --- Narratives --- Narratology

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Perché le persone scelgono di vivere in situazioni che esse stesse valutano negativamente e che provocano loro disagio e sofferenza? Perché accettano le regole e i comandi dettati da soggetti e organizzazioni con cui non sono in sintonia, e che spesso disprezzano? In breve: perché le persone si rassegnano e obbediscono, anche quando non vorrebbero? Di fronte a questa domanda, il libro argomenta che ognuno affronta sempre soltanto i problemi che crede di poter risolvere. I modi con cui immaginiamo il mondo plasmano i valori e le preferenze, i vincoli e le aspettative che orientano le nostre azioni. Sono i modelli mentali (gli schemi interpretativi del mondo), le credenze collettive (le convinzioni su com’è fatto il mondo) e le identità sociali (le convinzioni su chi siamo nel mondo) a determinare le nostre scelte. Quando smarriamo il significato delle nostre attività e della nostra presenza nel mondo, inventiamo futuri possibili, per meglio vivere in una società nella quale quei mondi inventati hanno efficacia. Tuttavia, se immaginare mondi è lo strumento fondamentale con cui interveniamo su noi stessi e sul contesto, non tutte le simulazioni sono uguali. Alcune reificano i processi sociali e riproducono le asimmetrie di potere, assegnando a qualcuno la responsabilità del cambiamento; altre si aprono a progettualità inclusive ed egualitarie. È sul terreno conflittuale delle immaginazioni del futuro che si gioca la possibilità di sradicare la servitù volontaria.

future --- economy --- politics --- fictional --- possible future --- voluntary servitude

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This volume examines the structure of text-based Future Narratives in the widest sense, including choose-your-own-adventure books, forking-path novels, combinatorial literature, hypertexts, interactive fiction, and alternate reality games. How ´radical` can printed Future Narratives really be, given the constraints of their media? When exactly do they not only play with the mere idea of multiple continuations, but actually stage genuine openness and potentiality? Process-rather than product-oriented, text-based Future Narratives are seen as performative and contingent systems, simulating their own emergence.

Play --- Text --- Performance --- Future --- Digital

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

We began this book with the aim of providing the first global and comparative perspective on energy vulnerability, in order to advance debates on the systemic processes and conditions that (re)produce domestic energy deprivation. By bringing together 13 chapters that cover 14 countries in total, the volume provides the first instance where such divergent contexts are brought together to discuss energy vulnerability in one common space. In this concluding discussion, we look across the range of contributions and draw out some overarching lessons, policy implications and future research directions.

energy vulnerability --- policy implications --- future research

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water traces the unspectacular work necessary to make water access a human right and a human right something different from a commodity. Andrea Ballestero shows how these ephemeral distinctions are made through four technolegal devices—formula, index, list and pact. She argues that what is at stake in these devices is not the making of a distinct future but what counts as the future in the first place. A Future History of Water is an ethnographically rich and conceptually charged journey into ant-filled water meters, fantastical water taxonomies, promises captured on slips of paper, and statistical maneuvers that dissolve the human of human rights. Ultimately, Ballestero demonstrates what happens when instead of trying to fix its meaning, we make water’s changing form the precondition of our analyses.

water --- wonder --- future --- difference --- human rights --- commodification --- ethics