In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenomenon in its own right. Futures are thus cont...

This book explores the growing intellectual interest in the politics of immunity. It argues that taking an ‘immunitary perspective’ is necessary if we are to better appreciate the body as a site of politics in the contemporary age. It explores the dynamic tensions between community and immunity, belonging and fragmentation, the social and the individual. It creates a dialogue between the social sciences, humanities and biopolitical philosophy around immunity.Immunitary Life

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. Other animals have stronger muscles or sharper claws, but we have cleverer brains. If machine brains one day come to surpass human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become very powerful. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on us humans than on the gorillas themselves, so the fate of our...

The author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Next 100 Years now focuses his geopolitical forecasting acumen on the next decade and the imminent events and challenges that will test America and the world, specifically addressing the skills that will be required by the decade’s leaders.In the long view, history is seen as a series of events—but the course of those events is determined by individuals and their actions. During the next te...

In this new edition of her bestseller, Jessica Williams tests the temperature of our world and diagnoses a malaise with some shocking symptoms. Get the facts but also the human side of the story on the world?s hunger, poverty, material and emotional deprivation; its human rights abuses and unimaginable wealth; the unstoppable rise of consumerism, mental illness, the drugs trade, corruption, gun culture, the abuse of our environment and more. The prognosis might look bleak, yet there is hop...

A fascinating look at the future, as you’ve never seen it. Ten years from now, will we have a tiny personal computer surgically inserted in an earlobe, capable of connecting to phone lines and the internet? Fifty years from now, will atomic-sized robots replace surgeons? A hundred years from now, instead of taking the bus, will we simply teleport to work? It all may sound like impossible science fiction, but not too long ago, so did walking on the moon. Journalist Jonathan Margolis intervi...

Elegant and audacious possibilities that push the boundaries of contemporary environmentalismDysfunctional cities, catastrophic climate change, ever-deepening distance from nature-today we see environmental disaster everywhere we look. In Mobilizing the Green Imagination , philosophical provocateur Anthony Weston urges us to move beyond ever more desperate attempts to "green" the status quo, toward entirely different and far more inviting ecological visi...

We are leaving the Information Age and transitioning into the Shift Age, a time of transformation and change that offers both great risk and incredible opportunity. In Entering the Shift Age, David Houle identifies and explains the dynamics and forces that have shaped our world and will continue to reshape our world for the next 20 years. He shows how the Shift Age means a world fully global yet focused on the individual, where the speed of change is so fast that change itself is ...

Our world runs on fossil fuels. It is estimated that oil production will drop to half of the peak amount around 2030. What will happen as we reach the point where there is no practical way to get whatever is still in the ground? Fossil fuels are in decline, but recoverable reserves of metals are also becoming less plentiful. Electricity will be in decline worldwide because it is produced mainly with fossil fuels. Without mechanization, irrigation, and synthetic fertilizer, yields for crops...

The acclaimed climate futurist examines our unquestioning faith in progress, and its limits in the face of peak oil and climate change.Since the Industrial Age began, scientific and technological progress has been nothing short of miraculous. As a result, progress itself has become the new religion of the West. Our faith in it is so complete that many of us ignore the perils of peak oil and climate change, believing that our lab-coated high priests will surely bring...

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past, writing that "there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece." In the years that followed, up until his death in 1944, Marinetti, through both his polemical writ...

Immortal Passage: Philosophical Speculations on Posthuman Evolution is Asher Seidel's speculative account of posthuman evolution. Seidel begins with the transitional period in which humans begin to live for significantly extended periods, then moves to the closer future in which, having transitioned, the now posthumans enjoy enhanced cognitive and creative powers. Finally, Seidel enters the distant future, where our descendants might possess abilities beyond the limits of what is ...