As both sustainability and the 'future' are inherently interdisciplinary problems, Futuring for Sustainability is an interdisciplinary course. Primarily engaging issues of sustainability through a social science lens, it introduces the notion of futuring, the active making and shaping of the future through social, scientific and technological interventions. This course teaches students that societies (and people in them) are always 'futuring'—and that different forms of thinking about the future can have very different effects on what kind of (sustainable) futures can come about.
The course starts with several lectures on the theoretical background of the future. It starts out addressing slightly philosophical questions such as ‘what is the future?’ and ‘where does the future come from?’, to prepare students to ask ‘what shapes the future?’. From this understanding, students can learn to think critically about the sustainability transition, by systematically asking ‘who can shape a sustainable future, and how?’. A core aspect of this critical capacity is learning to think about what social scientists call 'the collective imagination'. This idea, made famous by Yuval Harari's bestseller Sapiens (2014), has a long history in the social sciences—and will be deeply important in transitioning to a more sustainable society. We draw from a rich well of literature on the formation of futures, showing how the collective imagination shapes social, technological, economic, and political development.
The first series of lectures will address the first question, ‘what is the future and where does it come from?’. Here we address the most important theoretical work on the future, introducing key terms such as imagined futures (Beckert, 2015) to describe the idea that all decision-making about the future depends on expectation rather than fact, sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015) to show collective expectations and images of the future predetermine what kind of developments are imagined to be desirable, and co-production (Jasanoff, 2004; Latour, 1993). From these insights, student will learn how social, political, and scientific processes connect in the making of the future. The central aim of this section of the course is for students to understand that futures are both path-dependent and socially contingent. Futures aren’t completely open because they depend on the pathways we take in the present and have taken in the past. Yet they aren’t pre-determined either because we still get to make choices and policies to influence the future. In this first section, we look at sustainability issues as a fundamental challenge of our relationship with the future—and show that such challenges to our relationship with the future are nothing new. Specifically, we show students how the sustainability transition will be impossible without thinking critically about the future—about what the future could be like and what the future should be like.
In the second section of the course, we build on these notions of contingency and path dependency by addressing questions around how to design more sustainable future. Here, we want students to think about the relationship between future and present. How do visions of the future influence design and decisions now? And how these designs shape what is possible in the future in? What are the processes, designs, and infrastructures that give rise to futures, and what does this mean in terms of futuring for a sustainable future? In this second part, we move from a more theoretical understanding of the future to the more concrete question of how to design a more sustainable future. This means that in this second section, we ask students to actively engage with the question of how certain types of 'futuring' might lead to certain imagined futures and might preclude other options. Which types of futuring help shape a sustainable future?
The third section of the course then returns to the question of ‘futuring for (action towards) sustainability’. Here we address how we can engage in 'futuring' exercises ourselves, and how this make us more effective 'agents of change' in the climate change debate and other sustainability issues. In this third section, we return to the idea of contingent futures, to relate to the concerns and interests of various societal actors—and showing how they can lead to very different (un)sustainable futures. We show that imagined futures, even scientific projections, are always also political interventions that shape action in the present by different societal actors. This adds a layer of political and pragmatic reflection on how imagined futures around sustainability questions can open up pathways to sustainability or close them. In this third section, students will also create their own critical futures—and speculate how they might fit into a more sustainable future.