New Sciences of Protection@Designing Safe Living May 7, 2008

WORKSHOP 6: Futures
8-9 May 2008

Venue and times
Meeting Room 2-3 Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster
2pm 8 May - 4pm 9 May 2008

This session begins with a panel tilted Future Past, a reminder of the eternal returns of utopic desires for progress and security, focusing on the modernist aesthetics of the first half of the- twentieth century.

The focus on history moves to sociological debates about time and modernity through the work of our first keynote speaker, Barbara Adam (author of Timescapes of Modernity). The focus on timescapes and dangerous futures is developed further in a panel on visions of future ecological disaster in cinema, news media and debates on climate change. What are the ethico-political issues of societies saturated with images of insecure futures? On one level, the obsession with dangerous futures is (re)producing desires for protection and control, a theme explored by our second keynote speaker, William Bogard (author of The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies and The Bhopal Tragedy: Language, Logic, and the Production of a hazard ). These obsessions with insecurity are driving new forms of technical solution to control and protection in the wars against terror and environmental apocalypse, issues explored in a panel titled Ecologies of Control.

Returning to the questions that began the session: ‘Are the latest obsessions with control and protection moving us into a new ethico-political terrain or are they simply the latest manifestations of modernity’s desire for safe life? Or are obsessions with insecure futures and the desire to visualize the future through increasingly complex models confronting us with life at what Michel Foucault described as the ‘threshold of modernity’?’

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