Call for Preliminary “Futures” Symposium Presentation Ideas
From Sam’s email over break:
Presentations can and should come from anyone in the USP community. There’s no obligation to present, but it can be a fun and engaging atmosphere if the topic inspires you. The topic, if you’ve been living under a rock, is Futures. Since the retreat, we’ve gotten a little more specific about what this means. Basically, there are three headings under which your presentation might fit.
- The first is “Future Perfect,” which imagines and compares various visions of the future. This can be anything from a presentation about environmental catastrophe to a live demonstration of post-human perfection to a utopian dance performance — or perhaps all three in one?
- The second is “Winning the Future,” which is about the actual achievement of our goals in some foreseeable future. This could be anything from a presentation of a new gadget, to a policy brief, to a rap about youth political inspiration.
- Finally, the third section is “The Uses and Abuses of the Future,” which is a kind of meta-reflection on what we are doing when we talk about the future. This could be anything from a presentation on how people in other cultures and historical periods have looked at the future, to an explanation of what “futures” markets are and how the future is used more generally in finance, to a brief introduction to the art movement called futurism.
What we want from you at this point is ideas like these: briefly sketched ideas for presentations, discussions, demonstrations, or performances that you think you could create or lead. They should fit into one of the three categories above. In our next Seminar, Thursday, January 10th, what we’ll be doing is taking the list of ideas that is generated this way and trying to craft some coherent sessions out of them. Not all proposed presentations will fit into these coherent sessions, so proposing an idea neither guarantees you’ll get a spot in the Symposium nor commits you to doing the presentation. However, in order for this to work, we need lots of ideas to draw from! See the comments below for ideas already submitted via email and add your own!
From Linda Cao:
I’d be interesting in presenting on the power of genetics and its potential roles in our future. I can probably come up with a more specific topic that could fall into any of the 3 categories, based on what other Unis think would be most interesting and what balances out the symposium. Here are some preliminary ideas, which definitely could have some overlap:
Future Perfect: In short, discussing a Gatacca-esque type future. I read a book called “The Case Against Perfection” in my Ethical Issues in Genomics class, which would fit well into this presentation. Since humans naturally strive for enhancement and perfection (in technology, for example), is it ethically acceptable to apply the same mentality to our own genetic makeup, if given the opportunity?
Winning the Future: Brief overview about how genetics has already affected our lives and foreseeable developments. Topics: pharmacogenomics, use of genetic testing in court, direct-to-consumer genetic testing (23andMe), genetic engineering of insulin in treating diabetes, genetic screening before childbirth, etc.
Uses and Abuses of the Future: Focus on the eugenics movement in America. Briefly, this was a social movement aiming to improve the collective gene pool by eliminating “bad genes” from the population. This was done, in party, through forced sterilization of the poor, patients of mental institutions, certain races, etc. As scientific genetics becomes more developed and defined, could the power of this knowledge be warped and abused in a similar fashion?
From Maya:
Nikki, Meg, Wanyi and I are still working on a dance for the symposium. It’s concept is not fully formed, so at the moment, we could probably make it fit into any of the three headings (although maybe it would be better fit under Future Perfect or Winning the Future). So far we have been working with the concepts of interdependence and fear/ anxiety about the unknown — that the future is a source of anxiety and fear for most people in some way, but support from and of others is a primary coping mechanism for a way forward.
From Dhrusti:
Proposal: Future Perfect: The Uninsured (or the future of our health care system)
So I think I could present on our current health care system and relate it to changes we are likely to see or that need to happen in order to address the current problems. I did a photography project this past semester documenting the stories of people without health insurance in effort to break stereotypes of who the uninsured are and how the health care changes affects everyday people, not just the stereotyped “poor, unemployed”. The topic may possibly change a little bit but most likely it’d be a presentation on some aspect of the U.S health care system through photos (like a photo-documentary).
From Won-Ji:
– The future of love? It seems that finding love today has drastically changed than what it was twenty years ago. Now, there are more options and methods of finding a partner, primarily driven by new technology. But as this happens in the years to come will it actually become easier to find true love? How will our standards change? What will we want to see in a partner? Will we become more honest or dishonest with ourselves in what we love? Will there be some revival in old-fashioned chivalry? We must ask ourselves how our perceptions of love have changed throughout the years to the present, as well.
– The future of music. I am interested to see how the mainstream audience’s music tastes will change, in the sense of whether they will begin to listen and enjoy good music. It seems that today, the top 50 songs on Billboard’s Music Charts, seem to be the same vapid, unoriginal tunes by the same tasteless artists. The reason this is so, is because the youth has this mindless, strange, dance vibe mentality to associate their tastes in music with. I’m curious as to see whether this same youth will grow old of these tunes and seek some more musically meaningful music. I am also interested to see how artists will change their music as well. The Beatles, were the most popular band of the 60s, yet their music was quite meaningful. Perhaps the artists of today can sing about something other than partying, drinking, and having sex.
– The future of the distribution of music. The relationship between file sharing and the music industry is a constantly changing one. As music becomes much more easily accessed, how will record companies respond? Will artists decide to just not use them anymore, and use file-sharing technology to reach their audiences in a much more personal way?
– The future of intelligence and the education system. It’s no secret that the standard for education and intelligence has increased dramatically through the years. What it meant to be smart 60 years ago is incomparable to what it means to be smart today. But does being smart today, have anything to do with innate intelligence? It almost seems that humans today, as intellectuals, have been groomed to just follow the footsteps of others before them, and just try extremely hard to be “smart.” The fact that someone can be “smart” because he/she gets good grades or good test scores, is one that puzzles me all the time. That does not prove anything – it proves that you can just adapt to a curriculum and indulge a teacher or buy ten different practice books for a test and repeat those same motions again well. Great intellectuals are ones that discover things from within, coming up with purely organic thoughts solely from themselves. My best friend’s great uncle had very little formal education whatsoever decades ago, yet learned advanced concepts of business, entrepreneurship, engineering, and biology much better than any student would learn today in a classroom, because he had learned those things in the first place to quench his own, organic thirst for knowledge, not so it looks good in his resume. The education system today, makes it very hard for someone to do what my best friend’s great uncle did, as it constricts us and even molds our minds into thinking in a certain way – a way that only involves getting good grades and test scores. I am curious to see what it means to be “smart” and educated in the future – whether this same narrow form of education will continue, or a new, more liberating perspective will arise.
From Candy:
This isn’t a specific idea because I do not know much about the subject matter but rather what presentation I would enjoy seeing, inspired by the Singularity reading. I am always interested in human health and think it would be cool to have a presentation on nanomedicine—what is nanotechnology and how it is or can be used in health care. For example, is it possible in the near future for humans to ingest nanobots that can deliver their medicines on a timely basis?
From Brian:
One thing I think might be fun is to interrogate the concept of “future” itself. It implies a certain form of temporality where past is different from present is different from future. Maybe some basic overview of temporality and how it is and has been different in various times and places? This isn’t my specialty in anthro by any means, but I could try to cook something up. Another idea is to talk about “The End” — i.e., how we might all die. We read a really ridiculous but fun article in a Futures of Nature class I took last semester where this guy basically provides a list of various things that could end the human race, up to and including the possibility that we’re all living in a computer simulation and someone finally pulls the plug. Another essay asked the question of should we even worry about the extinction of humanity? Is that something really all that bad from the perspective of infinite time? Something on human extinction drawing form these essays would be interesting.
From Ana:
Aymara’s Back to the Future: Resisting the Colonization of Time
Many languages use spatial metaphors to express time. According to these metaphoric models of time, past is systematically located behind, whereas future events are seen as “in front of” the experiencer. However, as Núñez and Sweetser have examined, Aymara, the language spoken by the Aymaran people of the Andes, follows a different metaphoric mapping: “In Aymara, the basic word for FRONT (nayra, “eye/front/sight”) is also a basic expression meaning PAST, and the basic word for BACK (qhipa, “back/behind”) is a basic expression for FUTURE meaning” . Not only linguistic but also gestural data confirm this cognitive pattern. It has been proposed that past is in front in Aymara because the past is known, and therefore the area in front of the speaker is seen. Conversely, future remains behind: unseen and unknown. Aymara’s extraordinary case could be a good starting point for a debate about whether there are culture-specific models of time or universal models of time. I would like to explore these issues in relation to colonizer/colonized contexts, departing from the expression and understanding of future meaning in Aymara, but trying to open the reflection to epistemic and ontological futures. To what extent does future become a colonizable territory by virtue of its claimed universal nature? How does this colonization of the future intersect with the future conceived as a space for projections of resistance, for example in fiction and, more specifically, in Science Fiction? Could the Aymaran metaphoric model of time be considered as a resisting model, especially when observed in its interaction with Spanish? Since Aymara is an endangered language, I would also address its fragile future in my presentation.
From Nikki:
Future Perfect: The future of ballet (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57552076/nyc-ballet-forges-the-art-forms-future/): This could be generalized to different levels. For instance, the future of art, given digital influences and our cultures’ changing preferences for sources of entertainment
Winning the Future: Renewable energy: This is an obvious topic, but I think it’s important to continue to raise awareness about alternative energy sources (wind, solar, nuclear, hydro/tidal, etc.) that we should really be adopting as soon as possible. [Aside: I actually went to Dr. McKibben’s talk when he was here at Duke in the fall.] A more specific topic could focus on the technologies that have been adopted in Germany, as well as non-technical aspects of their transition (economic, political, etc.).
The Uses and Abuses of the Future: Perhaps something on risk? This could take on many flavours…
Modeling the Future | Boundaries of Life
I would like to examine a simulation of life that merges many academic disciplines called Conway’s Game of Life.
I would create an interactive Conway’s Game that would allow me to change the basic parameters of the simulation (deterministic vs. probabilistic, parameters that represent different theologies and philosophies etc.) I would then discuss the implications of the simulation on both a abstract scale (what the game is trying to represent) and a literal scale (the question of when/if computers should be considered alive in the future.)
Those of us grads in the PhD Lab (Tina, Bobo, and Whitney) may want to present on the “Future” of education or some other digital humanities topic.
I have a thought for “Winning the Future”: Bootstrapping: Building the Future by ReUnderstanding the Past
My lab works to make future protein structures better by understanding how proteins, as a class, are supposed to behave. A great part of this understanding comes from datamining databases of known structures. But we constantly reevaluate and reconstruct those databases based on the understandings that we gained from the previous incarnations of those datasets. It’s a very iterative approach to pursuing the future, and one that might be worth exploring. I should be able to draw parallels to the way new data can cause us to reevaluate social history, with a little help from an appropriate historian type.
From Ana
My research project in cultural anthropology is actually about the impossibility of imagining a future for queer women in china today. Instead of approaching the problems facing the chinese lesbian community from the angle of political rights, discrimination or others, I am exploring how lesbians live in a temporal limbo, without a past (no history) and without a foreseeable future, since everyone is supposed to get married sonnet or later. This gets into alternative family structures, heteronormativity in a very nuanced way, and the importance of hope and imagination. This could fit under future perfect.
– related to that, I could present on something less theoretical, more accessible perhaps, about Chinese queer activism and the various strategies we could use to win the future. This will come out of the many years of activism I participated in in china, and address things like the limited aims of mainstream lgbt politics, problems of identity politics, translatability of American political agendas in a global context, what do we really want as the vision, is more LGBT visibility really better, how useful is queer theory, coalitional organizing, should we join forces with IBM or sex workers, etc…
Please let me know if these might be too discipline-specific. I can certainly come up with something more generic, if thats what the symposium tries to aim for. maybe just something fun about different feminist utopian novels and their various visions of alternative futures?
From Silvia
Future Perfect: The future of the global economy with various scenarios, taking into consideration the financial crisis that is affecting Europe and the US to a lesser degree now, the dynamics of fight for resources, BRIC’s development and protectionist policies, the new technologies and technological centers emerging, etc. I would want to run several scenarios with mid- and long-term repercussions, and compare and contrast the world once the scenarios have been run through.