MINDING FUTURES A Social Theory Exploration of Responsibility for Long Term Futures

In this paper I am concerned with contemporary industrial societies’ ability to extend themselves into the far future by economic, scientific and political means on the one hand and their inability to know the potential, diverse and multiple outcomes of this produced futurity on the other. I focus on this discrepancy between the future extension of action and knowledge in order to consider how we (as citizens and academics) may be better able to take responsibility for such long-term and often unknown and unknowable effects. I want to explore what strategies are available for situations where the industrial way of life creates long-term futures but our conceptual tools to know those outcomes are woefully inadequate. I seek to a) establish the status quo by outlining current practices and b) explore today’s available options for forethought and moral action. In the process I revisit historical approaches to the future on the assumption that the past may well hold vital clues for today’s dilemma. Biographical Note Barbara Adam is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. She is founding editor of the journal Time & Society and has published extensively on the social relations of time. Her most recent monograph is Time, published in 2004 under the Polity Press ‘Key Concepts’ Series. She currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship (20036) in which she explores the social relationship to the future. [email protected]; www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/whoswho/adam.html; www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/futures/ Acknowledgements This research has been conducted as part of a three-year project, entitled In Pursuit of the Future (2003-6), which is funded by the UK’s Economic and Science Research Council (ESRC) under their Professorial Fellowship Scheme. Earlier forms of the paper have been presented to members of the Cardiff School of Social Sciences’ research group Culture, Subject and Economy and to the 2004 conference of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST) at Cambridge University. I would like to thank colleagues for their perceptive responses and helpful comments.