B Adam – Adam UMinho Talk 250505 1 Futures in the Making: Social Theory Perspectives and Methodological Dilemmas

Futures are created continuously, across the world, every second of the day. They are produced by the full range of institutional means: scientific and technological, political and legal, medical and economic, educational and religious, at the level of the individual, the family, social groups, companies and nations. These futures extend temporally from the very short to the extremely long-term and spatially from the local to the regional, national, international and global. Examples of futures in the making relate to climate change, depletion of water and topsoil as well as nuclear, bio and nano-technology. By definition, these socio-environmental futures have not yet emerged as (present) phenomena and symptoms, thus lack reality status. As the ‘not yet ’ these futures are not accessible to empirical study. Does this place them outside domain of social science competence? Does their potentiality make the creation of socio-cultural and socio-environmental futures an exclusively political problem? If this was the case, who would be expected to provide the necessary social explanations, analyses and commentaries? If commentary on social futures is the task of the social sciences, how is it to be achieved? What are the conceptual and methodological difficulties involved in the production of those explanations, analyses and commentaries