Search
Program Calendar
Browse By Day
Browse By Time
Browse By Person
Browse By Room
Browse By Division
Browse By Session Type
Search Tips
Personal Schedule
Sign In
Session Submission Type: Panel
For scholars, the future is at times a formality, often placed at the end of an essay with a degree of reassuring self-evidence. This panel seeks to retrieve the future (and futurity) from its consignation as afterthought and theorize its centrality in communication and media studies. Despite (or perhaps a result of) assertions that the future has been lost in postmodernity and in the anthropocene, the future as a concept has recently garnered increasing attention and interest: as and in premediation, prospection, projection, cultural fact, imagination/fancy, collective thought, disruption and virtuality. The future is always-already an intervention or intervening (working with Derrida’s distinction between futur and à venir), whether in the service of continuity or disruption, whether communicated as a promise, warning, hope or threat. This panel “thinks the break itself” to use Jameson’s words, not only as something to-come temporally (planned, premediated or unforeseen), but also as a modality fundamental to epistemologies of communication and media.
The panels theme fits squarely into this year’s conference theme “interventions.” Each of the panelists theorizes the future and addresses how it intervenes and coordinates actors against the backdrop of a number of timely social, political and cultural issues: Brexit, the rise of Trump, immigration, surveillance and counterterrorism. The panel presents a variety of distinct conceptualizations of the future: as currency (Hong), as projection (Tenenboim-Weinblatt), as a return (Al-Ghazzi; Riley) and as predmediation (Szpunar). Yet, the individual papers play out in complementary and intersecting ways. This stems from the fact that the future is theorized across the papers as a fundamentally mediated construct, whether through narrative and social media (Riley), the news media (Tenenboim-Weinblatt), the informant (Szpunar), political discourse (Al-Ghazzi), and algorithms and markets (Hong). Riley discuses the weakening of “growth scenarios” in the face of a return to a “better era,” a “returnism” for which Al-Ghazzi provides a useful taxonomy. Tenenboim-Weinblatt and Szpunar both explore the complex mediality of the future as projection and premediation (concepts in tension) and force a rethinking of the communicative temporalities of both news media and the law, respectively. In each of these, the epistemological relationship/tension between of the past and future in communication requires re-theorization, a call captured in Hong’s analysis of contradictory fantasies of control and freedom, the epistemic black markets of shifting promises, threats, hopes, and warnings.
Make “Us” Great Again: Populism and Historical Futurisms - Omar Al-Ghazzi, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
On Futures, and Epistemic Black Markets - Sun-ha Hong
Scenarios of the Future - Patricia Riley, U of Southern California; Hyun Tae (Calvin) Kim, U of Southern California; Stefanie Zoe Demetriades, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication; Christina Hagen, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication; Grace Yuehan Wang, U of Southern California; Kristen Guth, U of Southern California - Annenberg School for Communication
The Subjunctive Attack - Piotr Szpunar, University at Albany, State University of New York
Media Projections as Interventions - Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Hebrew U of Jerusalem