Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Should humanity prepare for life on a less habitable planet? The magnitude of human activities indeed makes it necessary to think about their consequences and to consider tackling them with renewed imaginative foundations. From this point of view, science fiction may have the advantage of having anticipated the movement. By initiating and accumulating thought experiments, its narrative combinations offer a cognitive reservoir and a reflexive medium for interpreting the world. Science fiction, and its imaginary constructions, provide a rare representation of how ‘future generations’ live, act and organise themselves. Faced with the need for new intellectual resources and frameworks fuelled by the notion of the Anthropocene, this chapter will first show that imaginary productions of science fiction are also of interest as a distinctive way to represent and problematise (in the sense of Michel Foucault) the relation of thinking species to their habitat, and therefore to cast the Earth’s habitability, its state and becoming as collective issues. It will then specify the intellectual operations (exploration, framing, and experimentation in particular) that can be engaged on these bases, and thus the type of participation that science fiction can offer to build an ethics of the future.
This chapter explores the glitch as a generative problem which is capable of introducing unanticipated possibilities and futures into situations. We understand the glitch as a sociomaterial encounter rather than merely a technical error, and argue that it calls for (re)consideration of here-and-now possible futures through practices of response and repair. Exploring the ways that people seek to respond to glitches, we consider two case studies in which unexpected problems provoke those involved to speculate playfully and practically about new possibilities. In the first case, a malfunctioning ‘Teacherbot’ incites new challenges and pedagogical opportunities in an online learning environment. In the second, Hungarian activists creatively use infrastructural and political problems to make new spaces of protest and to press the government to respond to their concerns. Considering these empirical cases allows us to observe how playful and disruptive dispositions have worked to question the terms of possible futures in the real world, and to unsettle the seemingly given terms of power-relations. Glitches are not a panacea, but they can provide an impetus to act from within situations that are uncertain, and can therefore point to new trajectories and possible futures.
In this chapter we speculate on ways of listening with the planet as a way of producing multisensory knowledges of climate change. ‘Listening’ is a visceral experience that helps us consider the intricate, deeply entangled relations between human and non-human worlds through multisensory attentions. We draw on Oliveros’ notion of ‘deep listening’ and methodological experimentation to explore and speculate about the effects of climate change in the polar regions. Such speculative practices are informed by audio recordings of the movement of iceberg and glaciers, sea ice measurements and satellite imagery of the Antarctic and Arctic. By experimenting with the mergers of scientific data and creative practices we suggest that practices of listening make experiences of multiscalar climate change in distant places visceral and immersive.
For many years, questions about the future have been marginalised within the social sciences: asking how we might live in a post-fossil society, or what are the key decisions and events that could take us there, has been seen as outside of the disciplinary scope. In this chapter – which takes as its point of departure the ‘speculative turn’ that is increasingly inspiring a range of works, from foresight scenarios to design fiction – we insist on the need to invent methods and practices which provide speculative spaces that allow such questions to be articulated. We use our own speculative initiative, ‘The Museum of Carbon Ruins’, to foreground a series of ethical questions that accompany such speculative endeavours, but which have so far been neglected in contemporary discussions. Working within a critical utopian modality, Carbon Ruins does not foreclose ethical possibilities, but allows citizens to grapple with, evaluate, amend and critique the post-fossil futures that official policy is striving towards.
Bringing together contributors from Europe, North America and Australia, this book questions the purpose and outcomes of speculation in practical settings.
In the context of interrelated and complex global challenges, speculation is not just useful but necessary. The chapters in this book present a cross-disciplinary dialogue of people that are developing work in speculation and interrogates its practices and ethical and political charges. Through these discussions, the book explores the potential of speculation in addressing issues such as climate change, urban futures and new political practices.
The conclusion reflects on the two case studies – Helsinki and Manchester – and brings together common themes outlined in the previous chapters. The conclusion then moves to the notion of cruelty of failure, as it emerges in smart city experiments, when failure is normalised through optimism and is built into a promise that was never meant to be delivered. The authors describe in detail the idea of broken geographies and broken temporalities, and argue that in both of them, the environmental harms of digital and smart technologies are imagined as taking place elsewhere – in a different space and in a different time – and as such, are very hard to grasp or confront. The chapter concludes by turning to digital and material ruins that remain after a smart city project is finished, after an experiment is over, after a technology becomes obsolete. In the ruins of broken promises, the authors call for alternatives, such as digital refusal, care, and slow repair.
The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change.
Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.
Chapter 2, researched and written by Liu Xin, examines the smart Kalasatama district as part of the ‘Helsinki Innovation Districts’ project. Liu Xin begins the chapter by describing her encounter with the smart district online and offline, as she explored the area, its history, and its smartification projects, by foot and via various digital screens. The chapter then zooms in on Kalasatama’s environmental promises and describes in detail how the environment is understood through various material and digital imaginaries and practices. The chapter documents what promises are made and analyses the human-digital-environmental relations that are assumed and configured in these promises. The chapter concludes by asking, what is elided in these promises, how do they break, when and where? The main argument of the chapter revolves around multiple and contradicting temporalities that are at work in making Kalasatama a smart district, which both constitutes and captures the brokenness of Kalasatama’s environmental promises.
The introduction presents the book’s main questions and concepts. It starts with the following questions: How do we think about today’s cities as ‘green’ and ‘smart’, from the standpoint of environmental care, as well as from the perspective of global, anti-racist, and environmental justice? How do we approach smart cities’ environmental promises while centring our discussion on their environmental harms? The introduction outlines how the book answers these questions, by presenting the framework of broken promises. The framework moves beyond the gap between a promise and delivery, drawing on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, which the authors situate in the context of digital political economy. The chapter details how broken promises need to be examined through smart cities temporalities and geographies and concludes with personal reflections by the authors on how their own research trajectories and experiences have shaped the collaboration which led to this book.
