What do we want from a sociology of the future?: Exploring the epistemological needs of an emerging field

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the epistemological conditions of a sociology of the future. This article offers three conditions for a grounded sociology of the future: 1) It must be more than a study of utopia and dystopia, 2) It must be able to think of the future as something rather than nothing, 3) It requires an accessible understanding of time as it pertains to emotion, imagination and reason. There are already examples of successful future oriented sociology that satisfy these conditions, but the markers of a sociology of the future are often implicit rather than explicit. Together, these conditions are necessary to transcend the limitations of speculative futurism, while offering an alternative pathway to stagnation or reactionary thinking. Where Mark Fisher has described the slow cancellation of the future (2014), and Barbara Adam and Chris Groves have described a commodification and colonisation of the future (2007: 13), this article will investigate the topic of alienation as a means to ground the future in the everyday. This article is admittedly speculative and aims to bring generalist sociological readers into a futures discourse that can be applied in a vast range of research contexts.