ANTICIPATION 2022

By Christopher Burr Jones

ANTICIPATION 2022 was held on November 16–18 in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory located in the Rob and Melani Walton Center for Planetary Health at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. The fourth in a series of global anticipation conferences, previous conferences were held in Trento, Italy (2015), London, England (2017) and Oslo, Norway (2019). This was a hybrid conference. On November 4, aroundthe-clock sessions were held virtually. Over 400 individuals participated in total; close to half attended face-to-face in Tempe. The ASU event was the first in-person conference for many since the pandemic, which gave it a special lustre.

It was an eclectic group of folks including the anticipation studies community and conference veterans, science and technology studies academics, social scientists, futurists, historians, and ASU futures faculty and students. Anecdotally, most participants I spoke to were anticipation conference newbies. More than half of the in-person participants were from outside the US. The plenary keynotes and panels were relevant and provocative. Concurrent paper sessions and workshops presented a problem, as usual, with a rich and diverse set of competing choices—I missed many presentations because of serious competition between desirable sessions. Topics ranged widely: regenerative futures, creative anticipations, imaginaries (present and futures), storytelling, visioning and backcasting, long/ deep time, cyborg relations, decolonizing futures/anticipation, postnormal times, critical futures, cyberpunk, creativity (good and bad), youth, governance, climate futures, and many other slices of anticipation studies.

My Centre of Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies colleagues Wendy Schultz, Maya Van Leemput, and I led a workshop/planning game using postnormal times elements for water allocations through 2045 AD and we each also presented papers (Wendy, “futures as chaos attractors”; Maya, “polylogue for futures co-creation; me, “dark side of creativity”). Many other past and current WFSF members participated: Frank Spencer, Riel Miller, Stuart Candy, Nele Fischer, Lydia Garrido, Jayne Fleener, Bruce Tonn, Peter Bishop, and Tanja Hichert… apologies to those current federation members that I missed.

For my part, it was a good mix of disciplines, levels of professional development, interests, and clear connections to futures studies and foresight. The conference itself was well organized, staff were helpful, the meals were above average, and the venue for eating and socialize was mostly outside in the inner courtyard of the Walton Center. The classrooms and auditorium were “state of the art.” There were external excursions including a daylong outing to Oracle, Arizona for a VIP tour of Biosphere 2.

Future Anticipation conferences are slated for Lancaster, UK (2024) and Turin, Italy (2026).