Speculative Research ─ The Lure of Possible Futures

So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of hopes, uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. How ‘social’ actors engage in strategies and techniques for explaining, managing and ordering futures has become a key concern of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of domains including political governance, advances in science and technology, environmental and ecological threats as well as the fragile unpredictability and overflows of market and economic processes.

Speculative Research casts a new light on such processes by responding to the pressing need to not only account for the role of instrumental logics and rationalities in managing societal futures but to develop more creative approaches that take into account speculative and practical engagements with possibilities for future-making that escape calculative rationalities and probabilistic anticipation.

Alex Wilkie is a sociologist and a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Design Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests combine aspects of social theory, science and technology studies with design research that bears on theoretical, methodological and substantive areas including, but not limited to: energy-demand reduction, design practice and design studios, healthcare and information technologies, human-computer interaction design, inventive and creative practices, user involvement and participation in design, practice-based design research, process theory and speculative thought. Alex is a Director of the Centre for Invention and Social Process (CISP), alongside Michael Guggenheim and Marsha Rosengarten, and convenes the Ph.D. programme in Design at Goldsmiths. He has recently co-edited Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies and Displacements with Ignacio Farias (Routledge, 2015) and he is preparing the edited collection Inventing the Social with Michael Guggenheim and Noortje Marres (Mattering Press). Alex is also a founding editor of Demonstrations, the journal for experiments in social studies of technology.

Martin Savransky is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches philosophy, social theory and methodology of social science. He works at the intersection of process philosophy, the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, and the politics of knowledge. He has published widely on the ethics and politics of social inquiry, postcolonial ontologies, and social theory. He is the author of The Adventure of Relevance: An Ethics of Social Inquiry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Marsha Rosengarten is Professor in Sociology, Director of the Unit of Play and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic in Information and Flesh and co-author with Mike Michael of Innovation and Biomedicine: Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV. Recent articles focus on biomedical research within the field of HIV, Ebola and Tuberculosis drawing from feminist and process oriented approaches. Her work offers alternative ways of conceiving intervention, bioethics, randomized controlled trials and, hence, the nature of scientific evidence. In 2009 she co-founded the international Association for the Social Sciences and Humanities in HIV (ASSHH). Although mostly known for her empirically oriented work on HIV and direct engagement with the biomedical field, in 2013 as Director of the Unit of Play in collaboration with Martin Savransky, Jennifer Gabrys and Alex Wilkie she initiated an intellectual project on speculation. The project has since involved various seminars and workshops and public presentations which, to date, have resulted in the manuscript Speculative Research.