Exploring the future. Future laboratories as mode of experimenting with visions for good life beyond existing society

• Applicants: Dr. Julian Kaspar Genner; Professor Dr. Markus Tauschek
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438183803

The project on future laboratories addresses current discourses and related practices of "exploring futures" (Reckwitz 2016). We understand future laboratories as spaces, which enable the enacting of visions for a good life beyond today’s society, its state institutions and its economic infrastructures. Drawing on and comparing two ethnographic case studies in Germany, the project focuses the ways of practicising futures in popular culture. The increasing erosion of social cohesion and the lack of an overarching vision for the future serve as a background for this project. Future laboratories are but one way of how various actors cope with current developments in society. The aim of the project is to introduce and establish the notion of future laboratory as analytical tool. In doing so, the project moves the study of future beyond the study of visual and textual representations (Reckwitz 2016).Case Study I "In Search of the Good Life: Practices of Exploring the Future at Utopian Festivals" does research into the ways, festivals imagine, negotiate and perform visions for a good life. Through critical engaging with the economic and ecological challenges of the present, festivals create and enact alternative futures. Yet the festivals shy away from political activism in the present. Case Study II "Surviving the Future: Imagining and Enacting Crisis in the the Prepper Movement" delves into the ways so called preppers envision the collapse of the state and how the prepare themselves for a good life in an apocalyptic future.By comparing both phenomena the project sets out to identify underlying structural commonalities und to understand the longing for a good life in an apocalyptic or utopian future respectively against the background of current transformations. This comparative ethnographic study is driven by overarching research questions: How do actors imagine and enact visions for a good life beyond the present society? How do actors stage futures in the present and what techniques and resources do they use? How do future laboratories enable specific ways of problematizing the present and of envisioning alternative futures? How future laboratories facilitate coping with contingencies in the present? The aim of the project is twofold. First, it enables an empirically saturated understanding of the ways future laboratories are entangled with present society. Second, the project broadens the scope of the anthropology through linking it with the anthropology of the future and through drawing on comparative analysis of two complementary phenomena.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants