Author: lisbethl

Visit to Lancaster for the Anticipation Conference

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 11. October 2024
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The 5th biannual Conference on Anticipation was hosted by the Centre for Social Futures at Lancaster University in September and IMAGINE was well represented, presenting four papers!

When: 11th – 14th of September 2024
Where: Lancaster University, United Kingdom

The conference emphasized questions of justice in 7 thematic areas: Social futures, Environmental crisis and societal change, Decolonising futures, Past futures and generational ancestries, Storytelling, imagination and the right to anticipate, Timescapes, timelines and timespans, and Ideas of the future informing action in the present. It further encouraged contributions to “use Anticipation as a means of engaging with the climate emergency, transitional justice, AI and ethics, energy security, social inequalities, public health and wellbeing, socio-technical systems, cultural values, activism, the right to protest, and more”.

Dan Welch, James Lowley, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Femke Coops and Dan Lockton from the Imagine consortium after a lovely dinner together discussing all things imagination, futures and anticipation.

The contributions from IMAGINE

In the session A WORLD OF FUTURES, Dan Welch presented the paper “Imagined Futures of Crisis in the UK and Norway”, co-written with Audun Kjus and Nina Heidenstrøm. The paper compares consumers stories in the two countries and how they see the future related to modernity’s ideas of progress.

In the session FEEDING THE FUTURE, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg presented “Between the future and the present: Norwegian food imaginaries” co-authored with Justyna Jakubiec, Virginie Amilien and Atle Wehn Hegnes. The paper compares food imaginaries from all three stakeholder groups examined in the project: consumers, businesses and policymakers. It further discusses whose anticipations are taken into account – whose ideas are allowed to dominate.

Imagine was also represented in two of three DESIGNING THE FUTURE sessions:
Dan Lockton and Femke Coops’ paper “Exploring imaginaries of ‘sustainable’ futures through design education”, presented the work they have been doing exploring the IMAGINE themes through work with students at Eindhoven University of Technology;
James Duncan Lowley’s paper “Experiments & Exposure – Design Imaginaries in a Workshop Context”, explored the contribution of critical design to the CONFRONT stakeholder workshops, an integral part of the project organised at the beginning of the year

Scroll down to read the abstracts at the bottom of this post.

Take-aways from the conference

The conference brought forward many perspectives relevant to the IMAGINE project and the work on creating sustainable futures.

The curated session called AFFECTIVE PREFIGURATION, chaired by Ann Light and Kristina Lindström brought forward the affective dimensions of change by calling into question our dealings with the emotions related to change, and in particular grief and hope. As one speaker put it:

Undoing our entanglement with fossil fuels will also involve the public and engender a certain sense of loss.

The questions asked in this session resonate with the consumer stories collected in IMAGINE: What are the things we are losing? And are we also gaining some? Do we experience grief in anticipation of loss and change and how can we work with this? And what is the role of hope within futures work?

Toby Shulruff’s presentation “How we tell stories matters: World Expos as Futures Lab” brought forward a complementary perspective on dominant imaginaries by discussing the future-making function of the World Expos and their underlying premise that we need one universal story that all can relate to.

Access the book of abstracts from the conference to read more about these papers here.

The 5th edition of the Anticipation Conference also brought forward discussions of the future of this emerging community of research – is it a field or a discipline? What should it seek to be? Are anticipation studies a part of future studies or is it a discipline of its own? Or should it remian a more open field and community, and what does it have to offer to other communities/disciplines?

Roberto Poli, one of the initiators of the conference, stated in his closing keynote that we know more about the future than we think. In reality, many things we know about the past are also based on assumptions. He hence challenged social sciences’ statements concerning the impossibility of working with the future as it is unknown.
This work of bringing the future (back) into social sciences, like sociology, is at the core of the IMAGINE project, and the multidisciplinary approach of the Anticipattion Conference, bringing together social sciences, design, and more, resonates well with the IMAGINE project.

Therefore, we, in the IMAGINE project look forward to participating further in this community and anticipate it developing, maturing and growing over the coming years!

Conference Abstracts

Imagined Futures of Crisis in the UK and Norway

Daniel Welch, Audun Kjus & Nina Vatvedt Heidenstrom
University of Manchester, Norwegian Ethnological Research, Oslo Metropolitan University

The promissory legitimacy (Beckert 2020) of twentieth century democratic capitalism was based on an understanding of the inextricable linkages of modernity, democracy, capitalism, and technological progress, and, a future of ‘prosperity for all’ and ever-rising living standards in the ‘consumer society’. Concomitant with accelerating climate change, ecological crisis, and, following the 2007/8 financial crisis, spiralling inequality and the rise of political populisms, there has been a profound loss of faith in this promissory legitimacy. The paper explores how people imagine the future in the context of the loss of this widely shared cultural understanding of the future. The paper draws on research from two projects, one in the UK and one in Norway, that have asked people to imagine the future —‘Imagined Futures of Consumption’ (2018-2021) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council) and ‘IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability’ (2021 – 2024), funded by the Research Council of Norway. The first produced data through collaboration with the UK’s Mass Observation Project, the second through a qualitative questionnaire issued by the Norwegian Ethnological Research Institute. Both projects produced free text responses to neutrally framed prompts or questions about imagining life in the future and produced rich data on people’s engagement with understandings of the future, climate change and ecological crisis, capitalism and modernity. The paper explores key discursive figures that emerge from both datasets and reflects through these on our contemporary historical moment.

Between the future and the present. Norwegian food imaginaries

Justyna Jakubiec, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Virginie Amilien & Atle Wehn Hegnes
Utrecht University, Oslo Metroplitan University

Food consumption is one of the major consumption areas that need to be reimagined to create a sustainable future. Policy documents and business strategies play a significant role in imagining and manifesting food futures on the consumer level. As such, they largely influence the consumers’ perspectives and their sense of agency in imagining possible food futures. Through a comparative study based on an analysis of Norwegian policy documents and business strategies, 137 stories collected from Norwegian consumers, and fieldwork on local food initiatives in Oslo, we ask: Whose voices and ideas of food futures are included in the imagining of Norwegian food futures and what imaginaries are manifesting on the consumer level? With Norwegian consumer narratives as a reference point, we approach our research question by exploring the narratives of the official documents. We further position the local initiatives in relation to these narratives. Our analysis shows that the narratives of national government policy and business strategies often overlap but differ from consumer narratives. In contrast, more resonance with the consumers’ perspectives can be found in the narratives of local government policy. For example, while business strategies reflect government policy’s focus on healthy food and propose on-the-go food products, consumer stories of a simpler life are reflected in local government policy’s focus on urban gardening. The more marginal imaginaries contained within the local food initiatives, however, resonate well with these consumer imaginaries. Hence, the analysis indicates that the narratives of official policy and business documents do not resonate with the consumer perspectives despite their significant influence on them.
Thus, the paper highlights the need for more negotiations between these dominant narratives and imaginaries from consumer narratives, manifested more marginally in local initiatives, to guide policy efforts towards manifesting futures that are desirable to the consumers who will inhabit them.

Exploring imaginaries of “sustainable” futures through design education

Dan Lockton & Femke Coops,
Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands

How do people imagine what a ‘sustainable’ future might entail in everyday life— and where do those ideas come from? How does the age of planetary crises affect these imaginaries at the level of everyday societal experiences? Can speculative and participatory design methods play multiple roles: by materialising aspects of diverse (and divergent) possible futures in engaging and experiential ways— enabling provocation, confrontation, emotion, and reflection; and also by helping people imagine different futures, beyond dominant imaginaries? Can this approach be valuable as part of the ongoing processes of (just) transitions? IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability (Welch et al, 2022) is an interdisciplinary research project across
humanities, social sciences, design, and arts, bringing together researchers from Norway, the Netherlands and the UK. The project aims to address the societal power of cultural imaginaries of sustainability— specifically in relation to imagined futures—via a
programme of research including working with design students in Norway and the Netherlands. Consumption-related practices around eating, dressing, and moving are taken as focal points for exploring these imaginaries. In this paper we will examine specifically our work with industrial design students in the Netherlands, at a technical university where largely techno-optimistic imaginaries of futures dominate, to explore where the ideas come from (in culture, media, and education), how they are socially performative (Oomen et al, 2021) within design, and how creative projects around
‘researching the future everyday’ (Kuijer, 2019; Kuijer & Robbins, 2022) can challenge, provoke, and build a broader base for imagination and transformative conceptions of sustainability in design. We discuss, through examples, methods and exercises which support this way of working, how elements of speculative fiction, hauntology (in the ‘lost futures’ sense of Fisher (2014), and other activities centred on imagination can contribute to a practical educational context for anticipation and design (e.g. Celi & Morrison, 2019; Morrison et al, 2023), We suggest how these approaches can be
situated in relation to other work on futures and design, including Transition Design (Irwin et al, 2015; Juri et al, 2021; Coops et al, 2024; Lockton & Candy, 2018) and the wider fields of design fiction (e.g. Hebrok & Mainsah, 2022) and speculative design (e.g. Mitrović et al, 2021).

Experiments and exposure: Critical design in a workshop context

James Lowley
Oslo Metropolitan University

This contribution shares the potential of critical design works when deployed as a central feature within experimental workshops intended to challenge stakeholder conceptions.
Relating to food consumption practices, the works were produced on a master course in product design that explicitly questions the dominant notion of design as a problem-solving activity, encouraging students instead to develop artefacts as a possibility-seeking, provocational medium. This approach aims to provide contrast to taken-for-granted modes of designing, and forms a space for collaborative imagining, exploration, and interpretation; both for the designer, and for audiences.
Once materialised, the works were displayed in the middle-section of a three-hour workshop beginning and ending with semi-structured discussions, and attended by stakeholders representing various political, commercial, and consumer perspectives as
part of ´IMAGINE: Contested Futures of Sustainability’; a project funded by the Research Council of Norway. The design exhibition was contextualised in a brief introduction, and provided a 20 minute reflective intermission for all participants, which was observed and visually recorded.
Initial outcomes suggest that for designers, food offers myriad relatable, material, everyday situations with which to engage and influence change. For workshop participants, perhaps especially those working in policy and business roles, the works
afford aesthetic unfamiliarity by deviating from norms and assumptions. In this way, both as process and product, critical design artefacts bring anticipated futures into question, and serve as a means to support alternative perceptions, values and strategies regarding the matter of food. While primarily discursive in its intentions, critical design
may have richer, more readily-observable affects when engaging the body as well as the mind; if it leverages the performative aspects of food-based interactions as well as their cognitive qualities. The workshop is a precursor to, and will feature in, a later exhibition that will further explore these multi-sensory possibilities.

News

The future of work: – I want to work less with a clear conscience

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 9. October 2024
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We fear suveillance at work and fight over jobs. But what we want the most is a future with shorter work days and more free time.

Project leader Nina Heidenstrøm was interviewed about the findings of the 150 Norwegian consumer stories collected so far via minner.no and what they say about the future of work.

In the stories, there is a stark contrast between the fears of tougher times economically, maybe even requiring two jobs to survive and AI and other technology enabling surveillance at work in and daily life, and the wish to slow down and have more time for other things than work.

There also seems to be a willingness to adjust consumption to lower incomes.

– However, it does not seem like people are willing to reduce their level of compfort, so I am unsure what they imagine that they will use less of, Nina says.

You can read the full article in Norwegian here.

Conferences

The ESA 2024 Conference

The European Sociological Association’s main biennial event this year took the IMAGINE project to Porto!

When: 27th – 30th August 2024
Where: University of Porto, Portugal

Set on the beautiful backdrop of Porto, the main themes of the 16th ESA conference were “Tension, Trust and Transformation”. About 20 researchers from Consumption Research Norway SIFO participated in the conference this time around, which for a long time has been a very important arena for the institute.

Between sessions, we also had time to visit the city, eat some Francesinha and get acquainted with the chickens living on campus.

Two presentations from IMAGINE

In the session, Imaginaries of Consumption, part of the Sociology of Consumption Research Network track, two papers from the IMAGINE project were presented.

Nina Heidenstrøm and Audun Kjus presented “The Utopia of Frugality. Imaginaries of Sustainable Consumption” co-written with Atle Wehn Hegnes and Harald Throne-Holst. The paper presents the narrative analysis of the consumer stories collected in the project (so far – the collection is still going and you can still submit your story on minner.no!). It in particular focuses on the strong presence of imaginaries where frugality plays an important role in a better world to come.
(See abstract below.)

Lisbeth Løvbak Berg presented the paper “Futures Literacy: Norwegian imaginaries of food and clothing consumption”, co-written with Justyna Jakubiec and Atle Wehn Hegnes.
The paper explores how futures literacy of food and clothing consumption is exhibited in the material collected in the project, across the three stakeholder groups, consumers, businesses and policymakers.
(See abstract below.)

Conference Abstracts

The Utopia of Frugality. Imaginaries of Sustainable Consumption

Nina Heidenstrøm, Audun Kjus, Atle Wehn Hegnes & Harald Throne-Holst
Oslo Metropolitan University, Norwegian Ethnological Research

Imagine that you are transported thirty years into the future. What does it look like? How do people live? What do you fear and hope for in the future? 137 Norwegian citizens answered these questions in an online qualitative questionnaire. Their responses take the shape of stories, imaginaries, of the future, that also consider aspects of consumption. More precisely, aspects of sustainable consumption because almost all the stories we collected revolved around man-made climate change, even though the respondents were not asked directly about it. When the respondents write about their own lives in the future, they do so in terms of virtues and vices as responses to the consequences of climate change. By means of narrative analysis, we examine how one virtue – frugality – is offered as an ideal for consumption both in micro-narratives of individual lives and in the macro-narrative level of the rules, ideals, and organisation of future society. The stories depict the frugal society of the future as going forward by going backwards to the consumption practices of previous generations. This frugality can be seen as an operationalisation of sustainability that translate into concrete actions the individual can take in their daily life. First and foremost, a frugal lifestyle entails engaging less with mass consumption and achieve a sense of freedom through self-production of food and clothing as a new mode of modernity.

Futures literacy: Norwegian Imaginaries of Food and Clothing Consumption

Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Justyna Jakubiec & Atle Wehn Hegnes
Oslo Metroplitan University, Utrecht University,

UNESCO has championed futures literacy since 2012, highlighting its importance in the context of imagining alternative futures and directing change towards desirable futures. It follows that futures literacy allows people to actively engage with the plurality of images of the future and relate them to their own choices and ideas of (un)desirable futures. While this includes understanding the role of the future also in people’s everyday consumption practices, which inevitably play a major role in the green transition, efforts are largely focused on policy planning, business innovation and higher education. We, therefore, ask what level of futures literacy Norwegian stakeholders exhibit related to food and clothing consumption. Based on stories collected from 137 Norwegian consumers, advertisements, and business strategy and policy documents, we highlight the different stakeholders’ narratives of food and clothing consumption to compare their engagement with present imaginaries of future consumption. We find that businesses and policymakers display a higher level of future literacy than consumers. In general, the narratives of food consumption are richer and more well-developed than those of clothing consumption: business and policy documents’ narratives of sustainable clothing futures are limited to the repeating narrative of ‘repair, reuse, recycle’, whereas food consumption narratives range from self-sufficiency to alternative protein sources. The latter suggests a higher level of future literacy, which may reflect a more mature discussion of food futures: adversely, the lack of attention to alternative forms of clothing consumption decreases the likelihood of a larger transformation of clothing consumption patterns.

Ukategorisert

Mining Literacies of Sustainable Consumption

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 2. September 2024
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What are the dominant imaginaries of a sustainable future? What do they say abou the future of eating, dressing and moving?

The IMAGINE project note “Imagining Future(s): Mining Literacies of Sustainable Consumption”, published this summer, tries to respond to these questions by examining imaginaries in popular culture, through films, novels and advertisements, and business and policy documents over the past 20 years.

Written by Justyna Jakubiec, Tamalone van den Eijnden, Lisbeth Løvbak Berg, Virginie Amilien,
Rick Dolphijn and Mimesis Heidi Dahlsveen, edited by Justyna, the note is a deliverable from Work Package 1 – “Mine”.

We asked one of the authors, and the editor of the report, Justyna Jakubiec, to tell us about it.

In short, what is this report about?

This project note highlights the question of what it means to imagine a future of sustainability and, as such, results from our research into the imaginaries of sustainable consumption. Our research results have been turned into a collection of dominant imaginaries, or we can say dominant themes, that we have recognized when looking into materials based in the time frame from the 1980s onwards. The final chapter is a reflection that further prompts the reader to contemplate how a sustainable future has been imagined and how the existing imaginaries influence our ways of imagining – and shaping – the future.

How does Ricoeur’s concept of imagination play a part in the work of this report?

one of our roles in the WP1. In particular, we paid attention to Ricœur’s emphasis on the close and strong bond between imagining and acting, consolidating and challenging, which turns imagination into a form of negotiation. This negotiation concerns that which is already there (such as novels or policy documents) and that which has not been realized before but can be through the productive potential of imagination. As such, his philosophy has become crucial for us to stress the importance of already present and dominant imaginaries of sustainable consumption for us as those who also imagine and shape the future. Thanks to Ricœur, we have noticed and celebrated the diachronic character of imaginaries – not following a linear timeframe but bringing the past, present and future together.

You examine very different sources to mine for imaginaries of sustainability. Why did you examine such varied sources??

First, this has allowed us to emphasize and embrace the interdisciplinary character of our work package and the IMAGINE project in general. WP1 has assembled a team of researchers with backgrounds in art and media, philosophy, food studies and cultural studies; engaging with the diversity of sources has put our equally diverse perspectives into the discussion.

Second, our aim was not to give an answer to the question of how sustainable consumption should look in the future. Instead, we strived to build a collection of themes, ideas, and materials that would incentivize – both ourselves and our readers – to reflect on ways of imagining the future we have already embodied and think about how we might want to continue. In the report, we show that imagining is a form of negotiation – the diversity of sources also emphasizes this claim and shows that imaginaries of sustainable consumption can be found in many different research materials.

How do these sources differ in the types of imaginaries they present?

Regarding novels and movies, we notice a strong focus on the notion of techno-future. It has two faces: its optimistic facet celebrates the ubiquity of technology and approaches it as having an emancipatory potential. The pessimistic understanding imagines a future in which technology has taken complete control over life, causing, for example, the mechanical production of food. Literary and cinematic materials, more often than not, offer very explicit imaginaries of the future; as such, they prompt us to critically and creatively reflect on our surroundings and our relation to them.

On the other hand, policy documents tend to contribute a relatively cautious approach to sustainable consumption in the future: they focus on the here and now, remaining hesitant and vague about the question of a more distant future. Unlike a great range of literary and cinematic sources, these documents tend to support and celebrate the technologically oriented narrative of future consumption, be it through product labelling or methodologies for monitoring the effect of diet on the human body.

Business strategy documents further add to the techno-oriented narrative, mixed with a notion of human empowerment through, for example, sturdy clothing or alternative mobility solutions. The imaginary of the future, is usually concerned with incentivizing consumers to buy more and consume more. The notion of innovation is central to most of the documents we looked into and usually adds to the incentive to consume more..

The report examines sources from the 1980s till now: How have imaginaries of sustainability changed over this period?

The omnipresence of technology remains, but approaches to it seem to have proliferated. Thus, the imaginary of genetically modified foods is juxtaposed with the call to develop a greater awareness of environmental issues, which can be seen in several novels and movies we have looked into. Especially within the domain of food consumption, the notions of local production and quality have been accentuated over the decades. The notion of human health has also become increasingly popular and has started to enter discussions within the business domain.

Perhaps most interestingly, things seem to have come full circle for some domains. Within the transport domain, for example, the discussion has switched from focusing on clean air unhampered by exhaust particles, electric vehicles, and popularising public transport to the re-appreciation of walking. As for eating, the discussion on sustainability has moved from a more specific focus on, e.g., food waste management to a more holistic approach to community gardening within urban spaces. All this shows that the past, present and future are not markers of linear time but, in fact, interlink.

Were there findings that surprised you in particular?

One of my most striking observations concerned policy documents and the fact that it is challenging to find the imaginaries of the future consumption they propose. That is not to say that they do not offer anything on the topic; they indeed do, but these imaginaries are implicit rather than explicit. Explicit mentions of the future are difficult to find in these documents, which is why one needs to engage quite close reading to gauge how the future is imagined within the domain of the political.

Another aspect that appealed to me is that textile consumption – or the practice of dressing in general – received very little attention. This aspect concerns all of our research sources and perhaps shows what is prioritized in the context of what it means to imagine a future of sustainability.

The full report can be found here.

The Norwegian Strategy for Urban Agriculture, one of the policy documents examined for the report.

News

Confront Workshops with ÆRA

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 13. August 2024
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In January, we conducted three Confront Workshops (WP4) in collaboration with our subcontractor ÆRA. Each workshop focused on a specific theme—eating, dressing, and moving—and involved 45 participants representing consumers, policymakers, and businesses.

Nenad Pavel presenting IMAGINE at the workshop.

Prior to the workshops, participants recorded short videos expressing their hopes, dreams, and concerns for the future. The three-hour workshops started with a plenary, which included a storytelling session. Participants were then divided into smaller groups of 3-4, sharing their thoughts about the future in general.

Mini exhibition at the Confront Workshops. Photo by Nenad Pavel

After the first group session, the participants attended a mini exhibition based on of some of the projects made by design students at OsloMet (WP3). In the second group session, the participants discussed their hopes, fears and dreams for the future of food, clothing and mobility. A final plenary summarized the discussions.

Participant work station at the Confront Workshops. Photo by Nenad Pavel

Participants used survey cards to capture their thoughts and insights throughout the workshops. The cards were filled in during the introductory session, after the first and second group discussions, and in the final session (example below).

Input from the workshops will be used in the forthcoming project exhibition.

Conferences

The Ninth International Convention on Food and Drink Studies

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 8. August 2024
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The European Institute for Food History and Cultures (the IEHCA, Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation) organised the ninth edition of its annual international convention and the IMAGINE project was there!

When: 5th – 7th June 2024
Where: Tours, France

Virginie Amilien chairing the food futures session at IEHCA. Photo by Atle Wehn Hegnes

During the conference Atle Wehn Hegnes and Virginie Amilien organised the session “The History of Food Futures: Imaginaries of Global Food Futures”.

The session aimed to

provide an international platform for scholarly discourse on the diverse and evolving perceptions of the future of food across various cultures and contexts. It invites a deep exploration into the ways societies globally have envisioned and continue to envision the future of food. We draw upon thoughts, such as the avant-garde ideas presented in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook,” a remarkable early 20th-century work that not only challenged traditional Italian cuisine but also proposed a radical rethinking of food in relation to art, technology, and society. Marinetti’s vision was more than a culinary innovation; it was a manifesto that reflected a broader futurist philosophy, emphasizing speed, technology, and industrial prowess, themes that are still relevant in today’s discussions about the future of food. Moreover, seminal works like Warren Belasco’s “Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food,” also inform our goal to broaden the perspective, inviting global viewpoints to understand how different cultures imagine their food futures. The session aims to explore how historical and contemporary imaginaries of food futures have shaped and are shaping global food cultures, policies, and practices. We seek to understand the interplay between societal aspirations, anxieties, and expectations concerning food, and how these are influenced by factors like technological advancements, sustainability concerns, and cultural shifts.

Virginie Amilien also presented the paper “Imaginaries of Norwegian Food Futures in a European context”, co-authored with Justyna Jakubiec, Atle Wehn Hegnes and Lisbeth Løvbak Berg.

The paper reviews the European literature on food futures, creating an overview of important European imaginaries of food. It further analyses and draws out connections to imaginaries of food futures in Norway, based on empirical data colleced in the IMAGINE project. The empirical material from the Norwegian case consists of public policy document and businessstrategies, advertisements, and consumer stories.

Read more about the conference here (villa-rabelais.fr).

Conferences

EASST-4S Conference

IMAGINE respresented at the quadrennial joint international conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)!

When: 16th – 19th of July 2024
Where: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Justyna Jakubiec (WP1) took part, joining 3300 contributors that gathered to explore and reflect on the role of STS in “making and doing contributions to transformations in an era of grand societal challenges”. The conference prompted its participants to look into the question of how their work partakes in the processes of rethinking the norms and shaping one’s positionality within the world they inhabit.

Justyna Jacubiek presenting. Photo by Tamalone van den Eijden.

Justyna represented IMAGINE by contributing to the panel ‘Creative transformations through performance and the written word’ through the presentation she has worked on together with our former WP1 member Tamalone van den Eijnden. She focused on the bond between urban gardening and imagination, thus reflecting on the research and fieldwork she did last year during her research stay in Oslo. Through the prism of her observations and encounters based in Oslo’s Losæter garden as well as close reading of some quotes from the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Justyna explored the potential of imagination for transformative processes.
The conference offered a space for sharing a real diversity of views, a great deal of which, as Justyna spotted, searched for unofficial ways of knowing. The focus of the contributions, ranging from thinking with the more-than-human, food-making and performance, the relation between policymaking and academia, rethinking the notion of temporality or imaginaries of hope has offered a rich environment for transdisciplinary discussions, observations and questions – all of which will feed into Justyna’s and Tamalone’s further work on the presentation paper which they aim to turn into an article.

Submitted abstract

This contribution explores the bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination to advocate them as modes for creative transformation. Rooting our focus in
fieldwork we performed in urban gardening initiatives in Oslo, we look into how they can be seen as turning the landscape into an expressive and nourishing medium that probes how the world could be. To broaden our focus, we introduce utopian imagination as a specific mode for transformation whose relevance goes beyond verbal communication and concerns imagination as a productive process that creatively prefigures and engenders new ways of social and ecological being. By taking Starhawk’s solar punk novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) as our inspiration, we will solidify the proposed bond between urban gardening and utopian imagination. To this end, we will engage with Paul Ricoeur’s approach to imagination to understand it as a form of negotiation with the environment beyond concepts and perception and, as such, an ecological endeavor. Engaging with a close reading of the repeated expressions of visions of a utopian future as found in the novel, we will explore how these become the means by which this very future is materialized within the storyworld. We will approach close reading of the novel as a nutritious, creative and reflective tool for imagining existing and future urban gardening. Thus, we aim to contribute to the larger field of STS by proposing utopian imagination as a medium for doing and making transformations within our foodscapes.

Events

Product design student exhibition

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 8. December 2023
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Welcome to the opening of a pop-up exhibition of IMAGINE, and confront your assumptions about sustainable futures!

When: Thursday 14 December 2023, 3–5 pm
Where: Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, Lillestrøm

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 408748730_862955935625185_6777624737445265490_n.jpg

IMAGINE presents projects by the students Stine Asbjørnsen, Eren Bal, Christodolous Christodolou, Preeti Kumari Jha, Silius Martinussen Lasskogen, Kumar Sourav Moharana, Haizea Perez, Julianne Pheng, Hamza Simsek, Alex Taylor and Natalia Wanguestel de Luna.

When you think about the future, what do you imagine? Flying cars, tubed food, or high-tech clothing might be among the images that come to mind. IMAGINE sets out to study these images of the future as imaginaries. Imaginaries are the many ways in which we humans think about the future and ways in which they can become possible.

This exhibition presents projects by second-year master students of product design, OsloMet, where they employ principles of speculative, critical design and design fiction to provoke questions and discussions about the imaginaries of a sustainable future.

The Lecturers in charge of the course are Nenad Pavel and James Duncan Lowley. Marie Hebrik from SIFO is the head of the related work package, WP3 Design.

The exhibition is on view from Thursday 14th December to Sunday 17th December 2023 and is realised in collaboration with OsloMet.

Click here for the Facebook event and more information (facebook.no).

Events

Workshop – Imaginaries, Power and Culture

Post author By lisbethl
Post date 19. October 2023
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On the 26th of September, Work Package 5, EXCHANGE, arranged the next edition of their workshop series, further developing the theoretical framework for the project and connecting the work packages. The workshop’s theme was ‘Imaginaries, Power and Culture’.

The workshop started with an introduction by Dan Welch and Nina Heidenstrøm and went on to updates from all the work packages on their progress before moving on to the theoretical discussions.

Work Package 1 – Mine

Virginie Amlien gave a brief introduction to the work package and gave the floor to Justyna Jakubiec and Lisbeth Løvbak Berg.

Future imaginaries in novels and movies

Justyna Jakubiec recapitulated the work on novels and movies done by Tamalone van den Eijnden, presented in a previous workshop ‘Negotiating Themes in the Fiction of Futures and the Imaginaries of Consumption’, reminding us of the themes found in them: Techno-Futures, Future according to Social Transformations, Future According to Marginalized Positions and Futures according to Climate Change/Transformation.

Future imaginaries in public policy documents

She went on to resent the work on the policy documents. In her analysis, she has brought in the concept of discourse from Foucault:

Discourses are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.
Michel Foucault

In many of the policy documents the focus has shifted over the years included in the study, from primarily having a focus on human health, to wider environmental concerns becoming a more significant part of them in later years. The connection between the environment and human health is often being made more explicitly in the newer document, as in the theme ” imagining through a food for the body”, in the image below.

During her stay in Oslo for the month of September, Justyna Jakubiec spent time doing field work and interviews in Oslo, visiting sites where futures for the three themes, eating, dressing and moving manifest through alternative practices or even through conflicts between ideals of sutainable life, habits and previous ideals. The latter is particularly evident in city planning, where the concerns of public transport and in particular tramways collide with the needs of cyclists, creating roads where cycling is dangerous.

Future imaginaries in business strategy documents

Lisbeth Løvbak Berg then presented the ongoing work on business documents and advertisements under the headline “Themes?”, as these are still being negotiated and will change throughout the analysis. However, some elements could already be drawn out, for example, the focus on local production when it comes to food, but also that different actors have strikingly different approaches to what local production is.

Future imaginaries in advertisements

At this point, advertisements from the same businesses whose documents have been chosen, have been examined. This allows for a comparison with their documents, in some cases underlining their content, and in others providing a contradicting image of the business strategies.
Advertisements do not very often explicitly talk about the future; however, they present ideals and aesthetics that may gesture towards it. For food, the aesthetics more often romanticise the past or community, while for transport, the visualisations are more often futuristic. However, technology plays a part in many. The phrase “the future is now” comes to mind.

Work Package 2 – Explore

Audun Kjus presented the findings from the consumer stories on minner.no, referring to the different types of narratives found in them: The Crisis Ladder, Ideals and Utopias of Frugality, Green Abundance, etc.
They represent different ways that the consumers see the future developing. The Crisis Ladder would for instance mean that one unfortunate situation leads to another worse, and so on, until a full-fledged crisis unfolds.

He noted that Green Abundance was only set in urban environments, and the gap between the rich and the poor was never addressed in these stories.

Audun Kjus talking about the discussion of the gap between the rich and the poor in the stories.

A question was asked about how the respondents saw their responsibility regarding a sustainable future. Kjus responded that most of the responses belonged to two categories; one where people had given up; the other where people described the changes they have made themselves and how these were ideals for other people to follow.

Work Package 3 and 4 – Design and Confront

Dan Lockton presented the work that he has done with his students at TU Eindhoven. It ranges from courses to exhibitions and can be found here, on the TU/e Researching the Future Everyday website.
In this work, an important question is “How do design students explore other people’s imaginaries?”, or even their own imaginaries. One way that this is examined is by confronting the students with a job ad from the future: Dear Design Graduates of 2023, WE NEED YOU. Here they are presented with future design jobs such as Human-Machine Collaboration Designer, and what this job entails.

Dan Lockton presenting student work on urban foraging for fashion.

James Lowley and Nenad Pavel presented student work done so far. One example was particularly pertinent in showing the relevance of critical design when imagining the future of shared, driverless cars as Ruter#, the Greater Oslo public transport company, is currently planning the introduction of such cars. The student project very efficiently asks the question: “What can possibly go wrong with self-driving cars?”

Nenad Pavel showing Ruter#’s self-driving cars.

Theorising Imaginaries, Power and Culture

Dan Welch led the next sessions, where Justyna Jakubiec first presented a glossary that is being developed for the project. The aim of the glossary is for the project consortium to negotiate common definitions for the concepts used in the project. This is particularly useful as the consortium combines a range of different disciplines. In the following group work, concepts to add to it were discussed and the glossary is in constant development.

Following this, Atle Wehn Hegnes introduced the different texts in the proposed readings for the day (you can find them listed below). We then discussed them and their relevance for IMAGINE in groups, focusing on the following topics:

Where does IMAGINE position itself related to these three research agendas?
What are we doing differently?
What is our unique contribution?

There was agreement that the material aspects of futuring practices, e.g., through design, was something that IMAGINE brings that is often omitted.

Another question asked was “Does the distinction made between narratives and imaginaries made in the texts have relevance to IMAGINE, is it helpful?”. Some thought this was helpful; that the two concepts define two different layers, where imaginaries represent the overarching ideas of the world, that are often not expressed directly, and narratives are the stories we tell about the world, where the imaginaries shine through. This is a discussion we will continue going forward.

Discussion on Collaborative Publications

Dan Welch presented a range of publication possibilities and a quick round table brought forward several publications that are already on their way. We then divided into groups according to our research interests, ranging from social transformation to ethics. The following discussions uncovered many more exciting synergies and publication prospects!

Program

10 am – 12 pm: Sharing Progress and Plans

The first session will be an opportunity to hear from each of the Work Packages about work in progress, preliminary results and plans for the rest of the project.

12 – 12.45 pm Lunch

12.45 – 2.15 pm: Theorising Imaginaries, Power and Culture

In this session we would like to engage with thinking around the power and performativity of imaginaries – drawing both on the IMAGINE project’s empirical research and theoretical orientations and other work. To facilitate these discussions, we invite you to read two or more of the attached recent papers, listed below, as well as something from the wider reading list attached.

2.15 – 2.45 pm: Coffee

2.45 – 4 pm: Discussion on Collaborative Publications

In this session, we would like to consider how we can collaborate across the IMAGINE project, both in terms of a major project publication, such as a Special Issue, and in terms of collaborative publications across WPs.