Futures in Contention: Projecting Sustainability in the Rio+20 Debates

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that hasn’t happened yet? In this paper, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyper-projectivity,” that is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I analyze contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I analyze how programmatic and oppositional debates about the meaning of “sustainable futures” and the “green economy” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach (extension into short, medium and long term futures), attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I do this at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative and subjunctive verb forms, as well as the use of temporal markers and the characterization of the subjects and objects of action. I close by suggesting ways in which these different projective strategies might be mapped onto particular positions in the contentious, conjoined fields of environmental policy-making and activism. Draft: Please do not cite Futures in Contention: Projecting Sustainability in the Rio+20 Debates Ann Mische University of Notre Dame [Note to the Measuring Meaning conference: this paper is preliminary, with the data analysis still underway. I have chosen to give a programmatic overview of my theoretical framework, as well as a sketch of my analysis-in-progress of the Rio+20 documents. This may very well need to be split into a programmatic and an empirical article. I am quite excited about how the empirical work is developing, and I welcome your suggestions as to how to take this forward, both theoretically and methodologically.] While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more segmented and fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that hasn’t happened yet? Futures exist by definition in a state of potentiality, involving risk, hope and uncertainty, and are thus even more subject than the past to contestation and debate (Gibson 2012). Because futures are constituted as imagined pathways and possible end-states, they often encompass multiple branching possibilities for realization; it is hard to pin down what, exactly we are studying. The possibilities for recombination are, in potentio, more diverse and multi-stranded as memories of the past. While narratives about the past are certainly open to contestation and revision, they are still disciplined by truth claims that they are recounting “what happened,” which is arguably more rigorous than the discipline of “what might (or could or should) happen.” Yet while futures imaginaries exist “in our heads,” they are nevertheless subject to a variety of externalizations in text, talk, and material objects, which make them accessible to empirical study. In this paper, I first review some of the perspectives by which projected futures – and their impacts on actions – have been studied in social science research. I discuss the promise as well as the inadequacies of these different analytical approaches. I then discuss ways in which recent conceptualizations of the dimensions of projectivity (e.g., Mische 2009) might be operationalized in empirical research. I suggest that there are at least four different ways in which we might study imagined futures: 1) longitudinal survey research; 2) narrative analysis of texts and interviews; 3) observations of performance and conversation; and 4) the analysis of material culture. While these methodological choices are more or less general in the social science, each of these has particular strengths and weakness as applied to the study of future projections.