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Anticipatory Knowledge

Instructor(s): Joseph P. Masco
Winter 2024
Close up view of computer chips. Text that reads:

Prognosis, prediction, forecasting, risk, threat – we live at a time of proliferating expert anticipatory futures.  This seminar explores how the future is brought into the present as a means of establishing new modes of governance.  It focuses on the historical evolution of expert regimes from closed world systems to emerging forms, tracking how notions of danger (marked as crisis, disaster, and catastrophe) index and invade the present.  The seminar approaches expert futurism as a vehicle for thinking through complex systems, ethics and knowledge production, and the role of the imaginary in security institutions (crossing techno-scientific, military, financial, environmental, and health domains). 

ANTH 52715 | CCCT 52715 | ENST 52715