Sharing call for contributions to EISA-PEC Section 20 Making Futures Out of a Broken World

[IPS Section]

Dear IPS Section,

I wanted to share a call for submissions to our EISA-PEC section that I think would be of interest to IPSmembers and subscribers of the mailing list:

We are inviting panel, roundtable, and paper proposals for S20 - Making Futures Out of a Broken World: Imagination, Technology, Aesthetics at the EISA Pan-European Conference in Bologna, Italy, 25-29 August 2025.

 

Section Chairs: Rens van Munster (r...@diis.dk) & Kiran Phull (kiran...@kcl.ac.uk)

Images of catastrophe have been at the forefront of political and anti-political discourse, from climate change and predictions about artificial intelligence to conspiracy narratives about the ‘deep state’. It has become increasingly difficult to imagine a future beyond the catastrophic present to which we seemingly only can bear witness. Yet, catastrophic imaginaries co-exist with financialized futures of speculation, tech innovation and other technologies of future-making. At the same time, radical futures – e.g., Black, Indigenous, multispecies, decolonial and queer futures – challenge the idea of catastrophic end times from the margins. As a result, futures emerge at the intersection of various practices. Expert technologies such as foresight, forecasting, risk management, scenario planning, modeling, and horizon scanning now intersect with prophecy, speculation, fantasy, innovation, design, and imagination.

We invite proposals that interrogate future-making as a political practice that must grapple with irreversible loss, persistent uncertainty, and the need for alternatives. How might we conceive of futures when traditional frameworks of crisis, progress, recovery and repair no longer suffice? We seek contributions that examine how different actors, institutions, and communities imagine, design, craft, enact, inhabit and value futures while acknowledging that something in world politics is fundamentally broken.

 

Submission deadline: 20 March 2025

The link to the submission page can be found here: https://eisa-net.org/abstract-submission-guidelines-pec25/

For information on the conference: https://eisa-net.org/pec-2025/

With thanks,
Kiran

Dr Kiran K Phull

Lecturer in International Relations

Department of War Studies | King's College London

Strand | London | WC2R 2LS

e: kiran...@kcl.ac.uk | t: @kiran_phull