Routledge Handbook of Social Futures

"Thinking intelligently about the future has never been more important. Too often, however, it is dominated by the failed futurisms of prediction and probability. This book brings together in one place a host of new insights into how social futures are being made today from the relationship between pasts and futures and conflicting temporalities, to the role of narratives, new technologies, migration and planetary change. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of social futures and, in particular, for all of those interested in creating better futures. The book has the potential to set out a new, practice based, contextual and situated approach to the study of futures that locates the social at the heart of futures studies, creating a new interdisciplinary dialogue that will enrich the field." Keri Facer, Professor of Educational and Social Futures, University of Bristol, Editor in Chief Futures "We are experiencing the end of a certain type of epoch. And with that end comes a broad range of alternative options. This Handbook makes an important contribution to the need for re-assessing diverse aspects of our social, built and natural environments and of the logics we use to understand what needs to be done. With this collection, the editors Carlos Lpez Galviz and Emily Spiers give us one of the most distinctive analytics for an alternative set of options. The originality and the daring set of issues here proposed make this Handbook a must read". Saskia Sassen, the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Carlos Lpez Galviz, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the Theories and Methods of Social Futures at Lancaster University, UK. His books include Global Undergrounds (2016) and Cities, Railways, Modernities: London, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (2019). Emily Spiers, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Creative Futures at Lancaster University, UK. They are the author of Pop-Feminist Narratives: The Female Subject under Neoliberalism in North America, Britain and Germany (2018) and the co-editor, with Tobias Boes and Rebecca Braun of World Authorship (2020).

Introduction: Why social futures? 1. A beginning: A critical history of scenarios 2. Agency: Futures literacy and Generation Z 3. AI: The social future of intelligence 4. Anticipation: Flourishing for the future 5. BioFutures: Where futurists and biologists meet 6. Borders: Retravelling Nickelsdorf 7. Climate change: Transformational adaptation in Bangladesh 8. Collaboration: Collaborative future-making 9. Data: The futures of personal data 10. Ecology: Thinking ecologically 11. Economics: Catalysing large-scale system change 12. Family: Homeland connections and family futures 13. Higher education: The future university 14. Inquiries: Healthcare futures 15. Lines: Material cultures of future mobility 16. Literary futures: What fiction can tell policy makers 17. Mental health: What can social futures teach us? 18. Mobility justice: Sustainable mobility futures 19. Multi-planetary worlds: Mobilities of the space age 20. Narrative: Telling social futures 21. Postcolonial futures: Urban eventualities 22. Prospection: Producing social futures 23. Publics: Infrastructuring proto-futures 24. Queering: Liberation futures with Afrofuturism 25. Smart cities: Policy without polity 26. Urbanism: Creating urban futures 27. Utopia: Futurity, realism and the social 28. Visible cities: Envisioning social futures 29. Walking futures: Following in the footsteps of mobility pioneers