Fixing Futures Conference 2026
25–27 November Goethe University Frankfurt
Eisenhower Room (IG 1.314)
Faced with compounding ecological, economic, and political uncertainties, contemporary societies no longer imagine the future as a promise of progress — instead, it looms as a threat, a source of hazards, blockages, and tipping points. This becomes particularly evident in the proliferation of technologies of anticipation: Societies increasingly turn to probabilistic forecasting, performative prediction, and other sociomaterial practices that seek to govern an uncertain yet inevitable future. Rather than producing certainty, these practices reveal how contingent futures are constantly made and unmade.
The research training group “Fixing Futures” brings together doctoral and postdoctoral projects that examine how such technologies of anticipation operate across economic practices, modes of government, and the management of life. The conference places these projects in dialogue with international scholars to critically interrogate the political and material stakes involved — and to debate how futures are actively made, materialized, and contested.
WEDNESDAY 25th
| 02:00-02:15 pm | Opening Remarks: Thomas Lemke and Gisela Welz Eisenhower Room IG Farben |
| 02:15-04:15 pm | Resisting Time, Governing Life: Temporalities, Control, and the Limits of Biomedical Intervention This panel explores how contemporary biomedicine seeks to govern life by intervening in regulatory, legal, and clinical practices, juxtaposing egg freezing and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as two sites where futures are actively managed yet remain uncertain. In the case of migrant women engaging with egg freezing, fertility is figured as an anticipatory project shaped by affective, bodily, and economic investments amid precarious futures. In contrast, AMR exposes the limits of biomedical control, as microbial actors adapt and evolve in response to intervention. The panel theorizes both domains as arenas where governmentality, temporality, and more-than-human relations intersect: practices of preservation and delay confront processes of control, adaptation, and deferral. Bringing these fields into dialogue highlights how technoscientific interventions not only seek to manage uncertainty but also participate in its production, reshaping relations between bodies, infrastructures, and forms of life. 02:15 pm Beste Köse: Politics of Reproductive Deferral 02:45 pm Viona Hartmann: Unruly Companions: Governing Microbial Worlds in the Era of Antibiotic Resistance 03:15 pm Carrie Friese (LSE): Models for the Future: Changing the Terrain of Prediction and Precision in Health, Illness and Medicine 03:45 pm Discussion |
| 04:15 – 04:45 pm | Break |
| 04:45 – 06:45 pm | Future’s Past. Fixing’s Future A roundtable discussion on changing conjunctures and the research programme of Fixing FuturesWhen Fixing Futures was conceived, it responded to a conjuncture shaped by climate crisis, financialized capitalism, techno-solutionist promises, and the governance of uncertain futures. Since then, the terrain has shifted considerably. The Covid-19-Pandemic, new imperial wars, geopolitical fragmentation, ecological breakdown, and renewed struggles over public truth have changed the conditions under which futures are made, governed, and contested. Looking back, the roundtable asks what these transformations have done to the assumptions, concepts, and problem framings of the original research programme.At the same time, the present poses new questions for the future of Fixing Futures itself. Generative AI, automated decision-making, techno-authoritarian politics, continued attacks on science and democratic institutions, ecological regression, and geopolitical reorderings are transforming both the objects and the conditions of critical inquiry. Against this backdrop, the roundtable will also ask which concepts, empirical fields, and theoretical perspectives are needed today, and how Fixing Futures might be reformulated when the future itself has become a contested terrain of struggle over whose lives, infrastructures, and worlds are to be secured, repaired, or abandoned. Chairs: Julia Schubert and Josef Barla Panelists: Liliana Doganova, Anne Pasek, Martin Mahony, Carrie Friese, Thomas Scheffer |
| 07:15 pm | Conference Dinner and Party |
THURSDAY 26th
| 10:00-12:00 am | Who Speaks, What Remains? Representation and Dispersal of More-than-Human Natures This panel brings together two topics that are often treated separately: the representation and the disposal of more-than-human natures. It starts from the assumption that recognition and disposal are two sides of the same coin: some natures become legally recognized, represented, and endowed with a voice, while others remain invisible, diffuse, and difficult to address. We explore this relationship by bringing Rights of Nature into dialogue with environmental pollution. Rights of Nature, in their subjective form, seek to grant ecosystems a legal personhood, thereby making them visible and actionable within law and beyond. Forever chemicals as dispersed pollution, such as PFAS, pose a contrasting problem. They are marked by invisibility, persistence, and mobility, dispersing across bodies, environments, and legal categories. By juxtaposing these cases, the panel asks how more-than-human natures become visible, speakable, and actionable – and how they may also remain ungraspable, residual, or resistant to representation. 10:00 am Annabelle Müller: The Persistency of the Human – The Materiality of Forever Chemicals as Pollution Beyond Toxicity 10:30 am Nils Richterich: Becoming a Legal Subject of Nature. Rights of Nature for the Mar Menor Lagoon 11:00 am Henning Laux (Leibniz Universität Hannover): To Be or Not to Be? On CO2’s Many Modes of Existence 11:30 am Discussion |
| 12:00-02:00 pm | Lunch |
| 02:00-04:00 pm | Financialized Futures: Trusting Markets in Uncertain Times This panel will examine the market technologies and devices used by ordinary (European) citizens to plan for their futures under neoliberal governments, thereby contributing to the study of the ‘financialization of daily life’ (Martin, 2002). In Germany, citizens have become responsible for their own pensions and are encouraged to invest in the financial markets (through ETFs, for instance). In France, farmers are paid not only for producing food, but also for fixing the environment through valuation tools that turn nature into a capital and a potential source of rent. Drawing on an ethnographically-grounded approach, this panel will combine STS and economic anthropology to explore the conditions for investing and betting on markets in uncertain times. How does the financialization of future oriented public policies reshape ordinary modes of anticipation, spreading “conceptions of the world” borrowed from the world of finance (Chiapello, 2020)? What kind of labour and knowledge are required? In dialogue with Liliana Doganova’s work on valuation technologies and temporality (Doganova, 2024), the panel will ask whose futures are being valued or discounted. 02:00 pm Justine Leret: A “Business Voice” for Soils 02:30 pm Matthias Kloft: Investing in Advice: The Making of Retail Investors in Germany 03:00 pm Liliana Doganova (CSI, Mines Paris): Temporal appropriation: discounting, valuing and owning the future 03:30 pm Discussion |
| 04:00-04:30 pm | Break |
| 04:30-06:30 pm | Futuring Through Infrastructures, Infrastructuralizing the Future Infrastructures facilitate the present as much as they project, anticipate, and create futures through their materialization and contestations. In Flint, Michigan, contaminated water infrastructures give rise to infrastructures of provisioning that contest environmental racism by searching for new forms of trust and reliability that can be sustained into a livable future. In Europe, digitization of the agrarian sector infrastructuralizes a future wherein greater precision and visibility may be necessary to answer the uncertainties and disruptions that climate change might bring. In laboratories and museum installations, technologists are writing data with lasers onto glass, answering the “crisis” of digital media’s feeble durability with solutions that seek to immortalize human endeavour in an echo of the ancient past. In each of these ethnographic cases, infrastructures of a technological or human sort are enlisted to realize a future that meets the challenges of the present. 04:30 pm Elena Sobrino (Wesleyan University): Crisis Fatigue and the Problematization of Progress: Ethnographic Reflections from Flint, Michigan 05:00 pm Steven Gonzalez: Writing with Light, Archiving with Life: An Ethnography of Data Storage Futures 05:30 pm Anne Pasek: AI is the New Electricity: The Political Economy and Geopolitics of Infrastructuring AI Futures 06:00 pm Discussion |
| 07:30 pm | Dinner |
FRIDAY 25th
| 09:00-11:00 am | (At)tending to Ecologies – Apprehending Oysters and Cultivating Weeds Against the backdrop of contemporary ecological crises, this panel explores different ways crises are tended to, managed, and cultivated. Bringing the cases of seaweed cultivation and invasive oysters together, we reflect on how technoscientific engagements with ecological crises both reproduce and unsettle dominant modes of knowing, governing, and relating to ecologies. As a set of technoscientific attempts/endeavours to control the biophysical world, they (re)produce both commodities as well as power structures. In our panel, we will discuss (1) the apprehension of dangerous organisms in the case of invasive oysters around Sylt, Germany, and (2) the promises of aquaculture of seaweeds around Øygarden, Norway. We invite you to join us in thinking about the following questions: How is (invasive) life apprehended in the times of crises? How is seaweed apprehended within cultivation practices and where does it elude apprehension? 09:00 am Tobias Wagner: Invasive Oysters 09:30 am Hansjörg Graul: Cultivating Weeds, Farming Macroalgae 10:00 am Heather Swanson (Aarhus University): tbd 10:30 am Discussion |
| 11:00-11:30 am | Break |
| 11:30 am – 13:30 pm | Crisis Epistemologies? Anticipating Global Environmental Change Global environmental change unsettles the notion of ‘crisis’ as a bounded moment of rupture. Processes like climate change and biodiversity loss are dispersed across space and time, unevenly experienced, and causally complex. This session brings together historical, geographical, and sociological science studies perspectives to explore the crisis epistemologies through which such uneven space-times are assembled as global environmental crises. It asks how individual extreme weather events or dispersed transformations of ecosystems come to be known as part of larger crisis formations. Yet crisis is not only an epistemic object. It is also a condition in which science is confronted with the need for anticipatory and actionable knowledge under urgency, uncertainty, and political contestation. The papers in this session, therefore, trace how crisis reshapes scientific practice itself, giving rise to new fields, networks, infrastructures, and devices. The session opens a critical conversation on the ambivalences of anticipating global environmental change as crisis. 11:30 am Naomi Bi: Becoming Planetary: Biodiversity, Crisis, and the Limits of the Global Gaze 12:00 pm Julia Schubert: Recalibrating Climate Science? Extreme Event Attribution and the Struggle Over the Human Scale 12:30 pm Martin Mahony (University of East Anglia): Threatening Disaster: Science and Politics Amid Crises Fast and Slow 13:00 pm Discussion |
| 13:30-13:45 pm | Closing Remarks: Thomas Lemke and Martina Klausner Eisenhower Room IG Farben |
| 13:45 pm | Lunch |