Skip to main content
  • Book
  • © 2019

Critical Terms in Futures Studies

Palgrave Macmillan

Editors:

  • Includes contributions from a truly global set of scholars

  • Features an interdisciplinary profile with perspectives from cultural and literary studies, history, religious studies, American studies, Chinese studies, media studies, theater and performance, politial science, gender studies, and African American studies

  • Identifies transcultural patterns of knowing the future from global positionalities across the globe

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.

Table of contents (51 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
  2. Introduction

    • Heike Paul
    Pages 1-4
  3. Afro-Pessimism

    • Joseph Winters
    Pages 5-11
  4. Alternate History

    • Dirk Niefanger
    Pages 13-17
  5. Anthropocene

    • Sarah Marak
    Pages 19-23
  6. Archive

    • Martha Schoolman
    Pages 25-28
  7. Artificial Intelligence

    • Scott Sundvall
    Pages 29-34
  8. Astrofuturism

    • Alexandra Ganser
    Pages 35-43
  9. Calendar

    • Marc Andre Matten
    Pages 45-51
  10. Contingency

    • Wolfgang Knöbl
    Pages 53-59
  11. Data

    • Lev Manovich
    Pages 61-66
  12. Death

    • Nader El-Bizri
    Pages 67-71
  13. Decision

    • Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger
    Pages 73-78
  14. Democracy

    • Mareike Gebhardt
    Pages 79-86
  15. Development

    • Aram Ziai
    Pages 87-93
  16. Digitization

    • Scott Selisker
    Pages 95-98
  17. Divination

    • Ulrike Ludwig
    Pages 99-104
  18. Dreaming

    • Barbara Weber
    Pages 105-111
  19. Fate

    • Georges Tamer
    Pages 113-117
  20. Fictionality

    • John Carlos Rowe
    Pages 119-125

About this book

This volume provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future in 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields, which examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of “futurology” proper, it comes at future studies ‘sideways’ and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures’ vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects – history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy – and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present. In compiling such a critical vocabulary, this book seeks to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offers a toolbox for discussing them with an adequate degree of complexity.



Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of English and American Studies, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

    Heike Paul

About the editor

Heike Paul is Chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. She is the author of The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014) and the co-editor of The Comeback of Populism: Transatlantic Perspectives (2019). She is currently Director of the Bavarian American Academy in Munich. She previously served as Vice-President of the German Association for American Studies (2014-2017). In 2018, she was awarded the Leibniz-Prize by the German Research Foundation.


Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 129.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access