Possible Futures

Projects

Possible Futures

As human beings, we have partial capacity to choose our futures – individually, in specific groups and societies, and at global scale. This is a matter of both conscious choices and aggregate impact of unintended activity. What futures are possible is also shaped by processes and conditions humans do not produce and cannot control. Understanding what futures are possible and what factors shape them is crucial to exercising choice – as individuals or collectively, to achieve ideals or to avert disaster. 

Understanding possible futures begins with understanding the present as part of history. This includes attending to the openness and indeterminacy that make for multiple possibilities, the contradictions in every social situation that make change inevitable, and the combination of constraints and empowerments in which action is situated. At the individual level, we could say this is simply the nature of life and that our ability to take successful actions depends on these contextual factors (and on our ability to judge them and our motivations in relation to them).

Craig Calhoun's work focuses more on the transformation of larger contexts that are also basic to possible futures: capitalism, climate change, and world-making and remaking. In each case, we need to understand not only collectivities at various scales but also systems of variable complexity and openness, always structured by relations among parts and dynamic feedback loops.

 

Previous Publications

China

Europe

Cosmopolitanism

Capitalism and Crisis

Humanitarian Emergencies

Infrastructures

Radicalism

Conceptualizing Reconfiguration

Recent Publications

Works in Progress

“Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation and Transformations Today,” for Social Research: An examination of Polanyi’s classic book and key concepts it introduced, with attention to similarities and differences among the transformations of late 18th and early 19th-century industrialization, crisis in the first half of the 20th century, and growing crises today.

See Lectures from ISCTE Lisboa: Here.

"Infrastructure and Society" (with Hillary Angelo): Beyond the very smallest scale, infrastructure is a basic condition of social organization. It enables communication, coordination, and trade to extend ever more widely in space. It supports the growth of cities and the agricultural productivity and supply chains that sustain them. Durable investments in infrastructure are conditions of society as we know it and shape contemporary transformations.

"Eurasia and the Remaking of the Modern World-System": The modern capitalist, nation-state world-system was long centered in Western Europe and later in the U.S. It is now being reshaped by Eurasian integration—new infrastructures, markets, media, and geopolitical alliances—amid the decline of post-WWII institutions. This transformation involves regional reconfigurations and global contestation over the future of world order.