Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change

There are now new experiences of space and time; new tensions between globalism and regionalism, socialism and consumerism, reality and spectacle; new instabilities of value, meaning and identity. How are we to understand these? What is to be the future of thinking about the future? Mapping the Future is the first of a series which brings together cultural theorists from different disciplines to assess the implications of economic, political and social change for intellectual inquiry and cultual practice. The collsction offers radical reformulations of cultural theory in response to political, economic and technological change. In particular it focuses upon the intellectual project of speculating on the future, and the possibilities for critical utopian thought. The authors review the relationships between new pasts and unfolding futures; the effects of a more extensive geo-cultural consciousness; the implications of new configurations of power, authority and position for communities and identities. The result is an extensive consideration of the questions posed and the insights offered for the cultural realm of the emergence of innovatory material forces and theoretica