Futures anthropology, foresight and the polycrisis

It is increasingly proclaimed that the world is in a polycrisis, a term and set of assumptions which have become a moniker for our times; a moment where multiple crises converge, requiring urgent attention and a future-focused solution.

For influential organisations the polycrisis concept makes problems of uncertainty accessible to foresight-informed solutions. Yet foresight frames frequently foreclose the kinds of futures knowledge delivered and sustain a consultancy-led futures industry. 

Join Sarah Pink, Laureate Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University and Susan Halford, Co-director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures as they discuss the polycrisis, foresight and the role of futures research in addressing challenges facing society.

This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and globally.  The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.

Transcript

00:00:10  

This podcast is brought to you by the SRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures or ‘CenSoF’ of a flagship research centre led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other universities exploring sociodigital futures in the making. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged. 

00:00:30 Susan Halford 

Welcome to the podcast. I'm Susan Halford, Co-director of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, and it's really my great pleasure to welcome with us today Sarah Pink, who is laureate professor at the University of Monash in Australia and is director of the Futures Hub and also the emerging technologies research lab at the same university. 

00:00:53 Susan Halford 

Sarah will be known to many of the people listening to this. I'm sure for her award-winning work in design and futures, anthropology and perhaps especially for her work on digital ethnography, digital media, personal data and self tracking, and her 2022 book Emerging Technologies, Life at The Edge of the Future. 

00:01:15 Susan Halford 

Sarah has been visiting us in the centre for the past month and she recently gave the annual lecture for the University of Bristol School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, so a massive welcome to you, Sarah. May I start by asking you to tell us a bit more about the Futures Hub and the emerging technologies research? 

00:01:35 Sarah Pink 

Thanks, Susan. It's a great honour to be here in the centre and to be speaking to you today. I'm, as you said, director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, which I established in 2018 when I moved to Monash University. And although we're called the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, the whole idea of the lab is to really look at those dominant narratives about emerging technologies and think about how we might complicate them or critique them from a social science perspective. 

00:02:04 Sarah Pink 

So we are anthropologists, sociologists, designers and a political scientist. So we're reasonably interdisciplinary, and we're actually based 50% in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture and 50% in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash. So we really try to reach across the span of those different disciplines to have influence, of course, beyond our own, much more insular academic orbits, if you'd like to see it that way. 

00:02:34 Sarah Pink 

The Futures hub which we established that much more recently, last year 2024, is an outcome of my Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. The Fellowship focuses on future life in 2030 and 2050, and the hub brings together the programme of research that will do within the lower fellowship, but also we'll bring in other research projects, PhD projects and is really our kind of core research and communications hub as well for our futures research which we want to extend into other disciplines, but also outside academia, to partner with other organisations and of course, it's our point of connecting globally as well with other organisations such as the Centre for Sociodigital Futures and and many other people we connect with across the world. 

00:03:24 Susan Halford 

That's great. Thank you so much for telling us a bit more about that, particularly interested in picking up maybe more about the interdisciplinary work that you do and your work with strategic partners. But for now, I wonder, can I ask you to tell us a bit more about why you were keen to visit our Centre, CenSoF, and perhaps a bit more about what you've been doing during your stay here? 

00:03:43 Sarah Pink 

Yes. So I was really excited to see CenSoF when I realised that, you know, you had this fabulous centre funded here and noticed that the work you were doing at that interface between the social, the digital and futures, because of course there are so many synergies with the work that we do and the ideas that we have around, you know complicating dominant narratives developing new, more participatory experience based research methods that really understand future human life and the way that human life interfaces with multi-species lives and environments. So really, really keen to come here and to make those connections to understand the work that you're doing and also to bring our work into dialogue with the work that people are doing here. So it's just seemed like an amazing opportunity and I think also really telling around the really exciting new social science and design based methods and approaches and awareness around possible futures, which is coming about at the moment. I see it as being part of an international movement towards really finding that place for the social sciences and humanities and design disciplines in futures research. 

00:04:55 Sarah Pink 

And I really think that we need to work together collectively across the world to ensure that we have that, what I would call, a seat at the futures table, which I think the social sciences have been missing for a very long. 

00:05:06 Susan Halford 

Yeah, that's a really important point. I was just thinking when you were talking to ask you a bit more about, you know, do you think that the social sciences have been excluded and what you think the consequence of that is and at the same time, I was thinking about the lecture that you gave which I think is probably tackling that question from a slightly different direction. So in your lecture, you were talking about the recent use of this term polycrystal this, and since you gave that lecture, I've really noticed how often it pops up in different kinds of contexts and and your argument as I understood it, was that polycrisis which is gaining traction with governments, with NGO's and others, was that this is connected with notions of foresight which are mobilised by those actors, in some way to address the notion of polycrystals that they kind of appear to dovetail in some way, and that this is quite problematic, perhaps because of the lack of social science thinking that's involved, I'm not sure, but I wonder if you could say a little bit more about both the polycrisis foresight and what you think's missing in that assemblage, if you like. 

00:06:15 Sarah Pink 

Yes. And so Polycrystals is a term that's being used to understand the multiple crises in which we find ourselves at the moment. So that might be the climate crisis, geopolitical crisis also, crises like runaway technology that is not being regulated. So these different crises that come together into a big crisis. And so it's the Poly crisis as a term that's kind of been used to catch all of that and bring it together. 

00:06:41 Sarah Pink 

Now of course we do have the sense that we are in a crisis and there is anxiety and there is worry and concern across society. I think about the situation that we're in. 

00:06:53 Sarah Pink 

But anthropologists have studied crisis for a long time, and the idea that a crisis is a kind of a peak of a big problem, which can then be solved because of the risk mitigation and the steps that are taken to address it, is also in itself quite problematic, because crisis doesn't reach a peak in the stasis, which means it can then be captured and addressed. It's actually part of the ongoing state of affairs in which we live. 

00:07:18 Sarah Pink 

And the enterprise, Janet Roitman has done fabulous work in that area. So I'd like to acknowledge that I really am building on her ideas when I say that, and polycrisis is a perfect example. So of course, to capture the essence of what's happening in the world today, this notion of polycrisis is being used. And once it's really pitched as a crisis then it opens itself up to international organisations seeking a solution to it, and what I've noticed in there narratives, their summits, their websites, their publications, their toolkits, is really this focus on foresight. 

00:07:53 Sarah Pink 

So we have a polycrisis problem and foresight is being pitched as a kind of solution. Now, of course, this is actually very well meaning there are many kinds of more participatory foresight, decolonising modes of foresight, ways of using foresight to kind of garner the opinions and the approaches of diverse peoples. 

00:08:15 Sarah Pink 

But foresight isn't really underpinned by really rigorous theoretical scholarship. It's not underpinned by in-depth engagement with people in their real everyday life situations. Research has shown that the most dominant method of foresight is workshops. Now, workshops can be very good, but of course workshops are just moments in time, and very often they're sadly also expert workshops. Now, of course, everyday people can be experts, but very often the experts in these workshops are not everyday people. Then maybe people who are organisational leaders or stakeholders in possible future. 

00:08:52 Sarah Pink 

And who already have power and influence. So I think for me as an futures anthropologist, it's doubtful that foresight will really bring the new layers of knowledge that are needed to address crisis. If crisis could indeed be addressed at all. 

00:09:09 Sarah Pink 

The longer-term story about foresight is that foresight has been around for a very long time, and even in the 1990s, foresight was being pitched as a possible way of addressing the sustainability crisis before it went too far. 

00:09:24 Sarah Pink 

And since then there has been an awful lot of foresight, but of course the sustainability crisis and problem has not been solved by more foresight. In fact, it's got worse. So, as I said, I think while the call for more foresight is very well meaning, I don't think it's necessarily going to do the job of really solving the polycrisis. 

00:09:44 Sarah Pink 

And I think one of the reasons why it's not going to do the job is because forsight the methods it uses, the workshop methods, but also the drawing on existing surveys existing materials, which weren't necessarily even developed and created in a bespoke way for the particular problem they address. For example, in in foresight and also in horizon scanning, means that the knowledge base that's really used for foresighting, I don't think it's necessarily always fit for purpose. 

00:10:14 Sarah Pink 

So we end up in an in this situation where there's a new layer of knowledge that's being sought and being produced, but it's actually, what it can do and what it's about, what kind of knowledge it is, is is already foreclosed by the very problem that demands that type of knowledge, and because the knowledge fits the problem, which is a constructed problem. Of course, it contributes to the questions that problem asks, but it these might not be the right problems and they might not be the right solutions. It might not be the right knowledge. 

00:10:47 Susan Halford 

I mean, I think what you're what I'm hearing and what you're saying, and I completely agree with, is that these are deeply theoretical questions. They're methodological questions. They're empirical questions, and I want to come back in a moment to the consequence of it not being the right kind of knowledge. That's just a note to self. 

00:11:05 Susan Halford 

Theoretically, is it possible to say what you think theoretically is is lacking in this concept of foresight and just to give an example of what you think might contribute to a more theoretically engaged form of thinking about futures, I know it's a big question. 

00:11:21 Sarah Pink 

Yes. Well, I think the very essence of using foresight to confront her problem, like the polycrisis it really rings to me as being a risk mitigation strategy as a way of dealing with uncertainty, because of course, the polycrisis represents uncertainty. 

00:11:36 Sarah Pink 

And if one can conceptualise a way of mitigating uncertainty of reducing it, and if foresight can be seen as a measure to do that, well, of course that at that level would work conceptually. But as a futures anthropologist, of course I see futures as being inevitably uncertain. Uncertainty is kind of our currency. 

00:12:01 Sarah Pink 

And it's a basis through which we explore possibility. So if we think of uncertainty actually as a generative mode of being and and uncertainty is actually characterising the way that we are in life, we live in uncertain circumstances and then as people, as humans, we creatively improvise in these kind of contingent circumstances that are always characterised by uncertainty to to find our weave our way forward into possible futures and now. 

00:12:31 Sarah Pink 

For me there are various concepts that we can use to think about that process, how we experience it, how we engage with it and for example, trust and hope are two concepts I actually explore in the emerging technologies slash life at the edge of the future book. And by the way, I called it emerging technologies slash life at the edge of the future cause I couldn't really decide which should be the subtitle, so I wanted them both in there. 

00:12:56 Sarah Pink 

And of course, if we think about this question of could we move into this ongoing emergent future with a feeling of trust, could we move on into it with the feeling of hope now, how reassuring would that be? Imagine if we could live in what I would call trusted futures, where we trust absolutely in the circumstances in which we find ourselves. 

00:13:18 Sarah Pink 

We don't see trust as transactional. We don't see trust as a monetised asset which governments or organisations need in order to produce change or to get people to accept technologies that will produce change, but rather if we actually trusted in the relationship. 

00:13:33 Sarah Pink 

In what's set up around us as we live in possible futures, and as we take that inevitable step forward into what's going to happen next, so could we feel trust and could we feel hope as we go forward as well? 

Of course it's very difficult. The question of how we get there, but for me that's the gap.

00:13:48 Susan Halford 

And the kind of social theoretical accounts that we might draw on concepts and theoretical frameworks are really important for helping to think that through. And I can see a connection between your critique of the polycrisis and your critique of of foresight. 

00:14:05 Susan Halford 

Which is they're not really grounded in what we might call a performative or a ongoing production of everyday life, which perhaps you, as an anthropologist than me as a sociologist, we'd be much more familiar with those kind of practise based, loosely practised based accounts, both of crisis. And of futures. So so futures are not necessarily something to be seen because they don't yet exist. That process of speculating about futures is perhaps as much about the impact of that knowledge in the present as it is about what any kind of actual future is, is, is that am I picking up the correct kind of thinking in your? 

00:14:46 Sarah Pink 

Yes, absolutely. And so much of the currency of thinking about futures at the moment is numerical. For example, the local futures are also can be numerical, right? Well, we think about what's the, what's the weather prediction? What's the temperature prediction for Bristol in 2050? You know it's I was looking this up the other day actually. And it looks like it's about 4° hotter. So what kind of targets are being set for 2050? 

00:15:16 Sarah Pink 

We have net zero carbon by 2050. That's our future numerical target to be worked towards and of course then Backcasting comes in and and people try to work backwards from 2050 to now and then to work forwards to see how we can get there to create pathways to net zero and 2050. Now of course those are very kind of easy to understand numerical devices, but the processes by which we really move forward in an ongoingly emergent environment and the way we weave our way through through everyday life are very different from those numerical predictions and and forecasts. 

00:15:52 Sarah Pink 

So how do we really rebalance that to make those kinds of ways of envisioning the future numerically accountable to the social sciences? Now, I don't see this as a fight between the qualitative and the quantitative. I I don't see it as simply a critique. 

00:16:11 Sarah Pink 

One of the other concepts I try to use especially when I work with people from other disciplines. For example, recently in Australia, one of the projects that I'm part of, we work with experts in transition management. 

00:16:23 Sarah Pink 

And there my concept is to say our social science, our anthropological research complicates some of the pathways to transition that they might imagine, complicates some of those dominant narratives. So not to say that our anthropological research says, well, you what you're doing is wrong, it's not necessarily wrong. It's a different way of understanding the world. It's a different way of understanding process and and futures. But what about if we complicate and productively and generatively complicate so that we could start thinking differently together? Because of course in the social sciences we also might be might not be absolutely right. We're very embedded in what we think and what we think we know. And of course, I don't remember who said it, but somebody did say that you know the what we think we know is the most problematic and dangerous kind of knowledge. And that's again something we should be very aware of. 

00:17:11 Susan Halford 

Knowledge is power, as people would say, and clearly in this case, so those who can claim knowledge of the future have the kind of authority over actions in the present in terms of investment, in terms of public understanding. If there is such a thing in terms of policy, frameworks and so on. And I think that's, you know, what you're saying is a really powerful critique of that rather than of one particular form of knowing. 

00:17:35 Susan Halford 

Your book and your your slash title and you're you're wanting to have two titles is intriguing to me because of course one of the things it does is that life at the edge of the future is then utterly connected to emerging technologies. So these two things are very much joined in your thinking for that book. Would you like to say a little bit more? 

00:17:53 Sarah Pink 

About them, yes. And I I think for me writing the book was also, I often think about my research in terms of five year cycles, if you like, so the book was also for me very much about kind of closing off that focus on emerging technology. And not so much closing it off actually but opening it out much more. So I really wanted to see, as I said before, the emerging technologies question is really about the dominant visions, the technology focused visions, which really for example I did so much work on self driving cars, mobility as a service so very much in that that mobility space, I've also done a lot of work in the work future space as well. And of course I've done a lot of research about homes so mobilities work and homes are also core three. Another core strand in the book. 

00:18:40 Sarah Pink 

And I was really interested in how the technological future visions and emerging technology visions for each of those three sectors played out, and then to ask, how does this kind of imaginary from or with or in an experiential dimensions of what we might call life at the edge of the future. How does that actually interface with those narratives, and how do those? How does life at the end of the future complicate emerging technology visions? So of course, life at the edge of the future, I think of it as that moment as we step over into what we're experiencing living in now into what is, as I said before, inevitably next. And the important question there was, how do we want to feel as we slip over? Do we want to slip over into our possible futures, with a sense of anxiety or fear, or do we want to slip over into those futures with a sense of trust and hope? And of course it's it. It's the latter.

00:19:37 Sarah Pink 

Or, the other point about that though, we don't, everyday life is mundane. It's not usually very exciting. It's all about our routines. It's about when we do the laundry, about when we do the washing up, it's about going shopping, going to work. 

00:19:49 Sarah Pink 

Mobilities is about commuting. Being at home is about what you get up window and you get up in the morning and how what you do before you go to bed at night and and work of course is full of those everyday routines and one of the interesting things about that we want to we want everyday Monday in life to feel good. We want it to feel all right. We don't necessarily want it to feel utopian, we don't get around thinking I wish my everyday life felt utopian. We really just want it to, to go along in the way in which we expect it to so that we can then maybe do the more spectacular things that we build onto it. So how do we make that feel right? And then how do we make, how do we make up those that same everyday life in 2030 or 2050? Also feel how we wanted to feel. 

00:20:31 Susan Halford 

OK. 

00:20:32 Susan Halford 

Two questions I think out of that, if I may, the 1st or maybe an observation and the question, the first one is that that process of complicating. I think social scientists are very good at that, for good reason, because we are very attentive tTo the complexities of everyday life. 

00:20:50 Susan Halford 

That does disrupt those dominant narratives, which tend often to be rather determinist, and to assume that technology X will produce result Y and it will be great, or it will be awful. But more generally, that it will be great. So I really applaud your approach of situating that in the practises of everyday life, because that's in a sense, how technologies get done and how they they appear and exist. 

00:21:14 Susan Halford 

So that's I I really like the way that you talked about that. And my second question, you know again also really really like your attention to making things feel OK. 

00:21:27 Susan Halford 

How do you think the research that you do can contribute to that in a context where the power relations are highly uneven in terms of those future making processes, so on the one hand, yes, futures are made through the things that we do in everyday life. On the other hand, some actors have greater resources or reach in terms of the kinds of institutional structures that they can change. So how how do you see the relationship between those things? 

00:21:59 Sarah Pink 

Yeah, I think that's a super important question. And I see myself principally as a social scientist. And I feel that I do need to be aware of the amount of power I do and don't have and where my work and the kind of layer of ways of knowing and knowledge that I can produce is situated in this process. So I don't pretend to be able to personally directly influence industry policy and governments. 

00:22:23 

But, I do want to partner with organisations who can enable our knowledge to flow into the right places so that it can be implemented and engaged with in organisations, in policy and in wider sites of influence. So, for example, in the past, when I've worked with industry partners, in fact, myself and my colleagues, this is both in research I've done with my academic and industry research partners in Sweden and in Brazil. 

00:22:54 Sarah Pink 

We've worked with the UX Department, UX researchers within big technology organisations.

00:23:00  Susan Halford

User experience? 

00:23:02

Yes. So the user experience departments. And of course the user experience research as the designers, they already know where that gap in knowledge is and they know how to mobilise the kind of knowledge that they we will generate with them and in consultation with them within their organisation. 

00:23:19 Sarah Pink 

We can't step into their organisations to mobilise their knowledge, but but they can and and actually had an experience of that very early on in my career as well in an industry collaboration that I was involved in. So it's underpinned part of my approach with engaging with industry business throughout my career. At the moment also a group of us in, including people from sensors, are working with the science Diplomacy organisation and again, working with them to explore the kind of knowledge that social scientists and designers and creative practitioners can have also gives us an opportunity to work with a fantastic organisation who we can collaborate with again to, to work towards thinking about what how can we enable the social sciences to have a seat at that table? 

00:24:11 Sarah Pink 

So again, let's be realistic about what we as social scientists can do. But let's build our partnerships. Let's speak to those organisations and people who also know that there's something that they don't know. And that's for me is the consistent thing that comes across. There is a layer of knowledge that really organisations, government policy, all these other organisations that they don't have, they don't know what it is necessarily and and that's I think what we can deliver.

00:24:40 Sarah Pink 

But also going back to the question of power. We think about power. We think about capital. We think about government. We also need to think about the cycles that they work in, which tend to be short termism because the cycles of power and capital and investment don't tend to be as long term as we would want things to be. When we think from the social sciences as well. So there's another question of thinking about which temporalities. 

00:25:01 Sarah Pink 

And we work in and how can we feed that in iteratively into the temporal cycles that other organisations work and and appreciate their limitations as well? 

00:25:11 Susan Halford 

That was great. I really agree with you. I think there's a tendency to treat governments or commercial organisations in quite monolithic ways, and that are actually quite countered to the more normal theorization of a kind of the way that things get done, which also applies to governments and also applies to to commercial organisations. 

00:25:33 Susan Halford 

And certainly our experience has been absolutely what you just said, which is working with partners who accept that the limits of their knowledge are quite bounded by the kinds of organisations they are, by the kind of funding they have by the amount of time, kinds of expertise they have present in those organisations and of course, they're not all like that out there. But there certainly are organisations that are very open and wanting to hear more about this and I think it's, you know, it's finding those ways through, isn't it? It's finding the right partners and then the effects can be quite profound if not Big Bang effects, but again, you know they they weave in in unexpected ways sometimes into the practises of those organisations. 

00:26:14 Sarah Pink 

Yes, absolutely. And I I think it's also we need to consider who are the individuals working in the organisations who we engaged with, because I was talking before right at the beginning about, you know, the polycrisis and foresight nexus and how knowledge can become foreclosed. 

00:26:31 Sarah Pink 

And I think that knowledge within that kind of context and with all the other context we've been speaking about and knowledge, the kind of knowledge and ways of knowing that could be mobilised, become foreclosed because of the structural relations within which organisations exist, all different kinds of organisations and and of course our own organisations and our we work in universities, we work in funded project cycles as well, which again foreclose to a certain extent the ways in which we can create and constitute and mobilise knowledge. 

00:26:59 Sarah Pink 

So it's very much about thinking about the way that individuals can collaborate and work together. Organisations can work and collaborate together, but what are those structural circumstances that also frame everything that we do, us included?

00:27:19 Susan Halford 

Yeah, absolutely. I think the structural circumstances here are that we're out of time. I could carry on talking with you and hearing, you talk for much, much longer. Thank you so much. I've really got a lot out of listening to those those comments that you've made, for the people listening, if you'd like to hear more or read more, in fact, about Sarah's arguments in relation to the polycrisis and foresight. She has got an article coming up very shortly in Anthropological Forum which works through all of those arguments. But for now just left to say thank you very much and we're really looking forward in the Centre to carrying on this wonderful relationship with you and your colleagues at Monash. Thank you for joining us. 

00:27:53 Sarah Pink 

Thanks so much, Susan it's an absolute privilege to be visiting here and speak to you.

00:27:58  

To find out more about the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, visit the University of Bristol's website, where you can read about our research, follow us on social media and sign up to our mailing list. Thanks so much for listening.