Georgia Newmarch

Workshop Overview

August 5th, 2016Georgia Newmarch0 Comments

| Participants | Essays | Gallery | Over two days in July, the first meeting of the Everyday Futures Network took place. Twenty European researchers visited Lancaster University to discuss what ‘everyday futures’ could be as an area of research and how it is reflected in their work. Central to the workshop were discussions about how a new field could be created using specific theories and methods to illuminate the importance of the everyday in future making, and of the future in studying the everyday. On the first day,all participants were given 5 minute slots to present relations between their …

Everyday futures does not yet exist as an established field, but we believe it is an area worthy of exploration. Futures of work, future homes, city futures and energy futures all make assumptions about, and have far reaching implications for everyday lives that are seldom explored. Studying such assumptions can provide insight on how ideas of ‘a normal life’ and ‘the good life’ are made, materialized and performed. It can reveal the connections and contradictions between futures of multiple types and scales. Moreover, a focus on the everyday has the potential to reveal some realities overlooked in broad future visions, including the inequalities which such visions, strategies and plans tend to (re)produce. Everyday lives vary across generations and across the life-course, across time and space, across the seasons, and across cultures and countries of the world. We think that finding methods and processes of future-making that are capable of capturing these differences, and forms of analysis that explore how they are made in the first place, is an area ripe for development.