Post-Pandemic Futures: Affect, Responsibility and Materiality.

The last three years have brought with them an interesting, if unfortunate, opportunity to reflect on the future. The seeming exit from the pandemic has given rise to notions of a reset or restart to existing systems, and these ideas have become dominant in political and public discourse as well as in marketing strategies. The use of the ‘future’ as a way to convince audiences or sell products is not new (see Haraway 2016). However, the desire for future-oriented optimism in post-pandemic societies casts new light on existing and emerging topics in the sociology of futures. In this session we invite presenters to engage with some of these topics. Time is not only about remembering the past, living the present and planning the future. It is about feeling past and future in structures of feelings and affective atmospheres (Coleman, 2017; 2020). How do affective and sensory engagements and methods allow us to both create and reckon with futures? Thinking about making futures is inexorably linked to thinking about responsibility. As Adam and Groves (2007) have emphasised, futures are about action, knowledge and ethics. In the wake of the pandemic, how do we understand the nature of responsibility in the context of complex systems and diffuse actors? Thinking about the ‘wicked problems’ that occupy the future prompts us to consider complex entanglements of meaning and matter (Tutton, 2017). What can the sociology of expectations tell us about how we can not only understand, but contend with these wicked problems?