Futures

How might Cultural Geography relate to the future, in a critical moment in which ‘the future’ appears to be intensely in question? The chapter offers three answers to this question, each of which folds into different versions of the concept of culture, and opens different futures for Cultural Geography. Cultural Geography might perform a diagnostic mode that attempts to understand the formation of distinct imaginaries of ‘the future’, and how those relations are affectively (re)mediated. Here, Cultural Geography would become a way of multiplying the stories told about contemporary and historical relations with ‘the future’, as well as attending to their variability and specificity. Opening into a different version of culture as a way or form of life, and secondly, Cultural Geography might stay with how specific futures are part of, and (re/de)composed through, everyday lives. Finally, and more disruptively, Cultural Geography might practice a utopian mode of inquiry inspired by dissident traditions of immanent utopianism. Such a Cultural Geography to come might take as its task to illuminate and amplify traces of something better. Across these three answers, the chapter performs a simple affirmation – that all cultural geographies are geographies of the future.