Dear colleagues,
Welcome to the fourth edition of our newsletter. We did not really keep up with this newsletter given all the things that are happening around futures – and in the world.
Still, here is some information.
EGOS 2026 – let us celebrate
We have in deed reasons to celebrate: our EGOS SWG 10 won key awards this year:
the EGOS Best Paper Award: Donal Crilly & Quy N. Huy
- Framing shared futures in polarized settings: An emotional-temporal lens on the Northern Ireland peace processes https://www.egos.org/egos/about_egos/BPA-and-BSPA
the EGOS That’s Interesting! Award: Max Bogaert, Nicky Dries, & Joost Luyckx
- Sci-fi and the future of work: From inevitability to resistance
https://www.egos.org/about_egos/That-is-Interesting-Award
and the James G. March Prize: Ali Aslan Gümüsay & Juliane Reinecke
- Imagining Desirable Futures: A call for prospective theorizing with speculative rigour. Organization Theory, 2024, 5 (2)
EGOS 2027
We will have a full program at EGOS 2027. Our sub-theme on “Desirable Futures: Empirical Work and Methodological Challenges” will be organized by Alice Comi, Garima Sharma, and Matthias Wenzel.
Our SWG will also offer a PDW on “Teaching Future Making Approaches in the More-than-Human World” organized by Claudio Dell’Era, Beatrice D’Ippolito, Ilaria Durante, Federica Fusaro, Marion Ferrat, and Thomas Gauthier; and a
Sub-Plenary
on “The Future of Futures Scholarship: Research, Teaching & Engagement” organized by Nicky Dries and Ali Aslan Gümüsay with Grace Augustine, Jennifer Whyte, Kevin W. Lee, Luigi Mosca, Ilaria Durante, Claudio Dell’Era, Simon Pek, Jonas Friedrich, Anna Margolis, Ralph Hamann, Mette Morsing, Alexa Böckel, Ines Kuric and Fenja Nolting.
And beyond
Our EGOS SWG will formally end in 2028, but our ethos & work continues. Ultimately, the desirable futures community seeks to reposition scholarship from a practice that primarily explains the world as-is to one that also expands what is perceived possible and desirable worlds (and has done so through conferences, articles, special issues, engagement & impact). In doing so, it can help redefine scholarship as a practice that not only understands futures, but enables us to imagine and realize better ones. We hope that such efforts foster impactful, future-oriented scholarship. And believe that 2028 is not really the end, but rather the end of the beginning.
And if you have any suggestions on how to develop and institutionalize this work further, please let us know!
Last but not least, the Organization Studies SI on Utopias/Dystopias as Sources of Organizations and Organizing is now fully published:
https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/ossa/47/8?volume=47&vol=47&issue=8&publicationCode=ossa
Very last: I (Ali) have started a substack newsletter today, where I will, of course, also engage with futures.
Best wishes,
Ali, Amanda, Emilio, Juliane, & Tima