ANTH 220 - Human Futures

Credits: 4

This course takes a long view of the future as threat, opportunity, and crisis to consider the moments in which specific futures have become salient. In so doing, we focus on philosophy, social science, and science fiction as they operate in speculative idioms or attempt to capture other people’s speculative moments. This takes us through particular historical moments in the U.S. to think about forces like industrialization and deindustrialization, colonialism and decolonial movements, and modernization, development, and indigenous rights movements. Taken together, they help to show how concerns about the future enable and limit particular kinds of social formations, alliance building, and political organization. Offered regularly.