Futurologien
Ordnungen des Zukunftswissens
[Futurologies. Systems of Knowledge of the Future]

Knowledge of the future is as relevant for everyday life as for political decisions. However, this is a very specific type of knowledge, since the future is an absent object and, as a time form, it is always yet to come.
Strictly speaking, futures can only be addressed in the plural. They appear in different figures of speech and thought, generated through different cultural techniques and social practices, and formed through narratives and genres. Also, different scholarly disciplines develop completely different cultures of prognosis. Given the diverse and heterogenous nature of knowledge of the future, a cultural studies approach promises differentiated and novel insights.
Through lemmas such as “Promise,” “Fortune-telling,” “Prophet,” “Posthumanism,” or “Nanotechnology,” the 36 contributions to this volume explore a historical and interdisciplinary panorama of diverse futurologies.

See also the two workshops organized by the ZfL project Prognostics and Literature on the topic:

Futurologien I. Zur Geschichte und Aktualität des Zukunftswissens
Futurologien II. Zur Geschichte und Aktualität des Zukunftswissens