Call for Participation online workshop Interrogating Speculative Futures

Keynote speakers

Professor Ayo Wahlberg (University of Copenhagen- Department of Anthropology)

Dr Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths, University of London – Department of Sociology Methods Lab)

A workshop on the politics of imagining a future with(out) chronic illness

In this workshop, we invite participants to think with the politics of speculation and imagination when it comes to futures of living with, at risk of, or in treatment for chronic illness. What does it mean to speculate in the face of biomedical trajectories and policy developments that promise inevitable intervention, with an often slim or uncertain chance of ‘cure’? What alternative future orientations can emerge as a result?

Following a productive surge of engagements with the speculative across the social sciences, we seek to interrogate the limits and possibilities of imagining and opening up futures, from diverse subject positions and at different scales. Drawing on insights from across sociology, anthropology, STS and disability studies, this workshop seeks to move away from assumptions about the limits of a life with chronic illness. Instead, we are interested in the limits of technoscientific promise – the “curative imaginary” (Kafer 2013) and hype of “anticipatory technologies” (Erikson 2018) – while, at the same time, exploring the potentialities that emerge from diagnoses, prognoses, illness experiences, and care at the end of life. We are interested in how people with chronic illness anticipate the future, and how hopes and fears impact life in the present. How do medical programs, state policies, and systems of knowledge production foreclose and/or open up futures of “chronic living” (Wahlberg et al 2021)? And how then, can we understand the futurity of and in chronicity itself? What regimes of anticipation and speculation does chronicity produce?