Uncertainty and Possibility

Methods for Researching Automated Futures

“…For social scientists one of the most established ways in which to engage with this question has been to connect with design, including working with methods such as speculative design (Di Salvo, 2016), the creation of design fictions (Markussen et al, 2020), and the development of design futures workshops (Akama et al, 2018). As designer Carl Di Salvo puts it, speculative interventions give us the chance to "experiment with possible futures, to play out, materially and experientially, what might be, to suggest conditions we might chose to work towards, as well as factors we might have to contend with" (2016: 150-1).…”

“…Anthropologists have also long since collaborated with designers, in what is now well established across academia and industry as Design anthropology. Design anthropology practice and methods are varied, sometimes leaning more toward anthropology and others toward design (see Akama et al, 2018;Gunn & Donovan, 2012;Gunn et al, 2013;Smith & Otto, 2016). Importantly, however, such methods and approaches serve to re-orient anthropology, a discipline which has traditionally focused on the present and past.…”

Social work and child protection for a post-pandemic world: the re-making of practice during COVID-19 and its renewal beyond it

“…This paper will summarise observed changes in practices and also provide theories and concepts that can help to account for how such change occurs. Drawing on anthropological uses of the concepts of contingency and improvisation (Akama et al, 2018) and Rosa's (2019) sociological work on 'adaptive transformation' and 'resonance' we will show how social work creatively 'remade' key aspects of practice. Contingent circumstances -in the sense of the future suddenly being experienced as profoundly uncertain -defined life under COVID-19 and it was through improvisation that social workers remade relational practice, their capacity to be kind and practice humanely, and attempts to achieve closeness in the context of social distancing.…”

Future Anthropology Ethics and Datafication: Temporality and Responsibility in Research

“…There are, however, particular ways forward we suggest opening up to build: (1) critical ethnographies of that provide specific examples of how existing anticipatory interventions based on big data analytics are irresponsible, of how data is improvised with, and where data becomes entangled in mundane sites of everyday life and how it becomes part of generative sites of meaning; (2) modes of doing big data analytics which incorporate an ethnographic sensibility and that ask and seek to uncover ethnographic questions; and (3) methodologies for understanding how and where data become involved in the future temporalities and imaginaries of people’s lives—that is, to ask not only how the outcomes of predictive data analytics fall into and disrupt people’s lives but to undertake future-focused research that enables better interventions. For this to happen, a design anthropological possibilities– based approach (Akama et al, 2018) needs to replace approaches that seek to create solutions-oriented conditions through which data can impact on people within scenarios that have been predicted and projected in order that they can be controlled.…”