Heritage SF in London

I’ve been invited to join the Heritage Futures project at the Anticipation conference in London in November.

Heritage Futures is an international project, exploring alternative ways of shaping future legacies and assembling common worlds across different fields of conservation practice. I’ve been working with them to explore how Future Archaeology, a method for writing futures otherwise, might support their collaborations with heritage practioners.

At the conference I’ll be performing a Speculative Futures (SF) short story, and discussing the basis for its writing. Here’s the abstract…

Writing Future Archaeology

Archaeologists have long argued for “the productive and generative potential of breakage and decay” (as Joshua Pollard once wrote). Many elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences would agree: knowledge is situated, empirical evidence is always partial, the worlds we make from evidence gathered (in the ethnographic past) does not quite go together– like a collection of pot sherds it has gaps, is multiple, becomes diffractive. Our stories of the world are both empirical and creative– made from fragments and assembled. Donna Haraway calls such work Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, SF, in a provocation that reminds us (like Pollard) to explore the generativity of our partial not complete perspective. Through generating different empirical stories in collaboration with our evidence and with other interests, our world could be made otherwise. This will be a story and speculative fabulation of future heritage, told from fragments of evidence–in short, a future archaeology.

Anticipation 2017

8-10 November 2017

School of Advanced Study, London