Graeme Macdonald, Terra Schwerin Rowe and Hiroki Shin discuss the practice of “futuring,” or engaging with speculative futures, and think through how it might operate as a kind of corrective to what Terra terms the “domino effect” narrative of climate catastrophe.

Graeme Macdonald is Professor in the Dept. of English & Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His recent work includes an edited collection of Science Fiction Studies on "Food Futures” and one on Energy, Ecology and Climate in 21st Century Scottish Literature. 

Terra Schwerin Rowe is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the University of North Texas. Her research has focused on Protestantism, environmentalism, and capitalism, but her more recent research looks at Christianity, intersectionality, and extractivist energy cultures. Keep an eye out for her new book, which is entitled Of Modern Extraction: Experiments in Critical Petro-theology. 

Hiroki Shin is a historian of energy, transport and the environment. His research explores past energy transitions by considering energy markets, resource politics, and infrastructure, but also by thinking about consumer culture and everyday practices.

Their conversation covers a lot of ground. They are interested in imagining methods for building a museum as both a conceptual and material set of artifacts and stories, because they share a sense that this space can motivate people to think about moving beyond petroculture. Hiroki talks about his sincere concern for the ways that, in many established museum spaces, people are sort of “taken in” by existing technology. In relation to this, Terra asks: “what is the future of the impossible?” If the modern museum reinscribes some notion of the “technological sublime” of fossil-fueled industrialism, can it also be fitted to the possibility of a massive energy transition in the present and into the future?