Global Futures Speaker Series - Dougald Hine Event

When we look at the world around us and want to change things, where do we go for inspiration? Is there anything that can give us confidence that life might be different to the way it is today? For generations, in modern societies, the answer was 'the future': whether political or technological, revolutionary or reformist, the imagination was focused on the time ahead of us. Yet these days, the future sounds old-fashioned: somewhere in the past few decades, it lost the ability to serve as the natural home for hopes and desires, becoming instead a source of anxiety. In this talk, I want to think about how we live with the failure of the future - and whether we might be able to draw instead on the past and the present as sources for the political imagination.