Futures that Matter: the Politics of Speculative Futures
University of Amsterdam, (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
2-4 June 2027
Description
Futures that Matter explores the politics of speculation about the future in relation to our material conditions. Our ecosocial interdependence means that everything and everyone matters; this recognition can no longer be ignored when deciding how we live and move forward. Ideas about the future matter in a double sense: they are not only important, they materially influence both past and present. Since we do not know the future present, we can only shape the present future, and thereby hope to influence its course and discourse.
We approach the future as both temporal and spatial: futures are imagined in specific locations, for particular communities, and within concrete ideological and material conditions. These imaginaries have histories and genealogies; they include some
actors and perspectives (mostly futuristic perspectives anchored in capitalist and technoscientific progress), while excluding others (mostly from those marginalized by the coloniality of power, knowledge and gender). Futures are articulated in many
languages and media, from visual culture and literature to policy documents, scientific models and data-driven predictions. These are all ways to reify the future, to make the unknown concrete and seemingly controllable. Another way in which the future becomes tangible is through the language we use to speak, write and translate the future. This futuring language can suture or rupture, nurture or manufacture.
At the core of these imaginaries lies speculation. In this conference speculation is not (only) a literary genre but an operational logic of knowledge crucial to artistic practice, technoscientific innovation and political decision making. In an overwhelmingly
capitalist world, the future is a finalized product, packaged as promise or peril. Whether in novels and films, corporate scenarios, government white papers, or political propaganda, speculative futures are fictions that nonetheless have real effects. One
needs only to consider the concrete influence, the material, ecological and social cost, that the dominant fictions around AI exercise on our world.
This conference brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, aiming to examine imaginaries of the future and the politics of speculation. More specifically we seek to:
- Interrogate speculative futures as political practices. We ask: for whom and where has the future mattered and does it matter today? How do they shape norms, values, power relations, that constitute our lives on Earth and increasingly in outer space?
- Connect imagination to material conditions. How are speculative futures rooted in geological, ecological and infrastructural realities? How are they materially networked and lived in bodies and environments and embedded in everyday practices?
- Critically assess “objective” future scenarios. How do statistical models and algorithms present particular futures as inevitable and ‘objectively generated’? How do capitalist logics turn the future into a lucrative product and what alternative speculative practices resist or reconfigure this commodification? When do “what if?” questions demand change, and when do they stabilize
existing orders by disguising conservative practices as innovation?
- Foster interdisciplinary dialogue. How do literature, film, visual arts, games, policy documents, and economic or scientific scenarios construct futures as singular and closed, or as plural, contingent, and open? Futures that Matter explores these questions from the following thematic axes (but are not limited to):
- Biofuturism (i.e. biomimicry)
- Translating speculative fiction (i.e. how translation shapes future imaginaries)
- The languages of the future (how to write ‘futuristically’?)
- The politics of speculating about the past (i.e. Past futures, retrofuturism, non- modern and nostalgic futures)
- Crip futures
- Speculative futures in visual media (painting, movies/series, graphic novels, sculpture, social media etc. giving concrete images to the future)
- Feminist and queer futures
- AI and the future/The past of AI
- Sounding/sensing the future (extending the future to the other senses, ‘making sense’ of the future)
- The politics of speculative fiction (situatedness, commonplaces, agendas, speculation with matter, i.e. engagement with geos, bios, zoe)
- Ecological futures
- Spatial futures (from outer space to the geological strata that underlie our lives)
- Temporalities of the future (i.e. horizontal, vertical, cyclical temporalities ucronias, indigenous futures, parallel futures)
- Afrofuturism and black futures
- Future bodies (gender/queer/posthuman/transcorporeal)
- Food futures (security and sovereignty, gastrocultures, GMO, food technocience)
- The futures of social structures (i.e. work, family, friendship, love, health, medicine, education)
- Indigenous and postcolonial futures
- Archives (keeping the past for the future, archivisim and technology)
We welcome contributions by October 1st, 2026 to futuresthatmatter@protonmail.com
and in the following submission format:
• Individual academic papers or full panels: Include 300-word abstract and 150-word individual bio
• Workshops / other interactive formats: Include general title, short summary of the overall discussion/workshop
(max. 500 with individual bio(s) (150 words)
• Artistic interventions (i.e., readings, performances, screenings): Include 300-word abstract and 150-word bio
IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission of proposals: 1 October 2026
Notification of acceptance: 1 November 2026
Conference dates: 2-4 June 2027
https://nonmodernfutures.humanities.uva.nl/futures-that-matter/
es-that-matter/