Draft: Please do not cite without author’s permission Futures in Contention: Projecting Sustainability in the Rio+20 Debates

ABSTRACT: While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources, content, and consequences of collective memory, the study of future projections has been much more fragmentary. In part, this has to do with the challenge of measurement; how do you measure something that hasn’t happened yet? In this paper, I argue that future projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives, performance, and material forms. They are particularly evident in what I call “sites of hyper-projectivity, ” that is, sites of heightened, future-oriented public debate about possible futures. As a pilot project, I analyze contending narratives about possible futures in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit, ” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. I analyze how programmatic and oppositional debates about the meaning of “sustainable futures ” and the “green economy ” differ on various dimensions of projectivity, including their temporal reach (extension into short, medium and long term futures), attention to contingency and causality, and network mapping of future actors. I do this at the level of narrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative and subjunctive verb forms, as well as the use of temporal markers and the characterization of the subjects and objects of action. I close by suggesting ways in which these different projective strategies might be mapped onto particular positions in the contentious, conjoined fields of environmental policy-making and activism. Draft: Please do not cit