Future Anthropologies Network (FAN)
Intention
The Future Anthropologies Network (FAN) is committed to conceptualizing, debating, theorizing and practicing an engaged anthropology that puts futures at the centre of its agenda.
FAN was established as an outcome of the work of Anthropology at the Edge of the Future Lab held at the 2014 EASA conference. A key outcome of the Lab was to produce a manifesto, which captured and synthesised the feeling that we collectively took away from the lab and experience from our anthropological practice. The Manifesto, found below, was printed in the first edited volume that came out of the FAN Anthropology and Futures: Researching emerging and uncertain worlds (Salazar et al., Bloomsbury 2017).
Objectives
- To create and advance a responsible and engaged anthropological approach to futures, through scholarship, research and practice
- To establish anthropology as a discipline that is a key participant in contemporary debates and practical developments in discussing and making futures
- To enable early career scholars to see anthropological future-making as a possible career route
- To produce edited volumes as well as multimodal outputs
- To convene panels and labs at EASA conference
- To convene meetings, workshops and collaboration in the years between EASA
Management structure
Current Network Directors: Débora Lanzeni and Karen Waltorp, responsible for leading the Network’s policy and activities, represent the network to the EASA and other external bodies, and maintain an overview over all activities.
The network is managed on a rotating structure with the roles and responsibilities of its management committee handed over at the EASA conference. The network is led by a core group. Founding conveners were Juan Salazar and Sarah Pink, and in 2016 Débora Lanzeni and Karen Waltorp took over, and are the current network conveners until the upcoming biennial EASA conference in Belfast 2022.
Manifesto
The FAN Manifesto was written up collectively after the founding FAN-EASA meeting in Tallinn 2014:
- We are critical ethnographers engaged with confronting and intervening in the challenges of contested and controversial futures.
- We are stubbornly transdisciplinary and transnational: we collaborate, hybridise, and compromise. We break boundaries and network without fear of incapacity or contamination.
- We de-centre the human, embracing larger ecologies and technological entanglements.
- We probe, interrogate and play with futures that are plural, non-linear, cyclical, implausible, and always unravelling.
- Anthropology of the future is accretive. It builds on traditions, reflects on pasts.
- We are bold enough to engage with complexity and stay with differences and uncertainties. We traverse the macro, mundane and minute and embrace the chaotic, multisensory, performative, and material dimensions of social life in the anthropocene.
- We understand and are understood. We foster a politics of listening attuned to a diversity of voices and we tell stories that are imaginative, illustrative and informative. We create and design a variety of materials and processes that are provocative, disruptive, adaptable, and reflexive.
- We get our hands dirty. We are ethical, political and interventionist, and take responsibility for interventions.
- We may be epistemologically filthy, improvisational and undisciplined. We may struggle and fail and transform.
- Anthropology of the future supports current and future members to be part of a strong and recognisable community of practice.
