Critical Terms in Futures Studies

This volume provides the essential vocabulary currently employed in discourses on the future in 50 contributions by renowned scholars in their respective fields which examine future imaginaries across cultures and time. Not situated in the field of "futurology" proper, it comes at future studies "sideways" and offers a multidisciplinary treatment of a critical futures' vocabulary. The contributors have their disciplinary homes in a wide range of subjects - history, cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, media studies, American studies, Japanese studies, Chinese studies, and philosophy - and critically illuminate numerous discourses about the future (or futures), past and present, from various perspectives. In compiling this critical vocabulary, we seek to foster conversations about futures in study programs and research forums and offer a toolbox for discussing them with an adequate degree of complexity.

Heike Paul is Chair of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. She is the author of Understanding Stewart O'Nan (2019), The Myths That Made America: An Introduction to American Studies (2014), and Mapping Migration: Women's Writing and the American Immigrant Experience from the 1950s to the 1990s (1999). She currently serves as Board Member and Director of the Bavarian American Academy, Germany. She previously served as Vice-President of the German Association for American Studies.