Latinx Futurism: Developing Speculative Social Theory

• In Event: 40267 - Towards an Unruly Latinx Sociology

Abstract

This paper cultivates the intersection between the sociology of race and ethnicity, economic sociology, and sociology of science and technology by outlining a theoretical and empirical agenda of Latinx futurism. This agenda builds on the critical and creative intellectual movements of Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism that have blazed a path for understanding the importance of the political, racial, and cultural position of those doing the imagining. In doing so, these intellectual and creative movements aim to inspire us to think carefully about how we deal with the pressing social issues of our time and have offered a new lens for thinking about the future. This paper takes this as a departure point and works towards bringing Latinx futurism into sociology. I argue that such a theoretical move is critical if the discipline is to respond to the increased encroachment of capitalist and settler-colonial politics in academia. Research in sociology of science and technology and economic sociology has highlighted the ways in which imaginaries of the future have powerful effects on the way decisions are made about the organization of society today (e.g. Beckert 2016; Jasanoff and Kim 2015; Sismondo 2020) and have identified speculative logics fuel economic and policy decisions that consistently undermine the collective power of marginalized communities (Rajan 2005). However, these rarely provide a corresponding anti-racist and anti-colonial critique that names the patriarchal, white supremacist, and settler-colonial ideology behind these imaginaries. In contrast, when analyses have explicitly adopted the theoretical frameworks of the sociology of race and ethnicity, sharper and more critical examinations are possible.

Author

• Santiago José Molina, Northwestern University