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Knowing and Controlling the Future

This essay argues that critical attention to how the future is represented in and projected through texts and discourses can contribute to our understanding of their dialogical and constitutive capacity. As the site of the possible and potential, the future represents a contested rhetorical domain through which partisans attempt to wield ideological and political power by supplanting the notion of the future as the site of the possible with the notion of the future as inevitable. In so doing, they undermine the future as a conceptual space within which political, social, and cultural change can be imagined and realized. I ground my argument in a review of modernist conceptions of the future, particularly those developed by “futures studies,” and their social and political impact. This review contextualizes the issues addressed by recent discourse analytic studies, reviewed in the latter half of the piece, of how the future is represented in and projected through news media and policy discourses.