The Enduring Quest for the Future and Its Consequences for Scientific Inquiry

This paper analyses the social quest for the future and the function of its associated futurizing practices. Specifically, it discusses the role of the social sciences and the humanities for understanding these practices under conditions of intense precarity and uncertainty. This is weighed against the need to secure the future as an existential good along with associated political and economic attempts to colonize the future as a means and resource of further securing positions that are often already unhelpfully entrenched. In light of the complex interplay between these factors, this paper ultimately aims to conceptualize a role for the social sciences and the humanities as advocates for a more inclusive, open-ended form of futurizing. It is the argument of this paper that such a conceptualisation would allow for the maximum number of actors, make visible the diversity of futures and protect the essential status of the future as a place of unbounded potential and scope as well as its unavailability.