What Does the Future Hold?

Living through an emergency – an epidemic, war or environmental crisis – changes the way we think about the future. Some taken-for-granted assumptions about life are suddenly up for question, and new opportunities might appear.

Social anthropologists can’t predict the future, but they can tell us how ideas about the future are changing among different people, whether they are engineers, athletes, refugees or designers, here in the UK or around the world. Is the future near or far away? Is it full of hope or fear? What can we do about it? And what different futures seem possible to different people?

Following a specially commissioned podcast series with Durham University’s Anthropology department, Dr Michael Crawley, Prof. Nayanika Mookherjee and Dr Felix Ringel respond to the question we’re all increasingly asking: what happens next?