Besieged by the Future 1: In the Shadow of Military Strategy
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
