One thing I found that really stuck out to me was the irony of some of Nandy's statements in the context of our class. Here we sit, learning about his theories in a classroom, when one of the things that he argued against was in fact that exact thing. By it achieving the status necessary to be studied legitimately in a university, it has lost the battle to not become part of the machine.
I also found very interesting the little exercise that appeared in the Dator reading. I found myself trying to figure out what my ideal image of society. Unfortunately, I found I balked at the first step, choosing the starting "real place", because it seemed to me that that would so much shape the society I was to create.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Andrew's Minute Paper 2/13
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Andrew,
Great point! That's an irony I semi-acknowledged at the end of our class yesterday... However, on closer inspection, Nandy's concern is not about the study of futures per se (even in a classroom), but about the rigid "disciplining" of futures -- he refers to "the straitjacket of conventional knowledge systems". He fears it becoming just another option on the university menu, stripped of its power to generate dissent. It is therefore a mixed blessing to realise how marginal the field remains. Ours is one of a mere handful of courses in the entire University of Hawaii system which examine these ideas; and there are only two other universities in the whole of the U.S. that offer a graduate-level concentration in futures.
I don't believe we're compromised in Nandy's terms just by having this conversation in an institutional setting (note that his article comes from the most respected academic journal in the field, Futures), but there's certainly a tension to watch out for, between radical and respectable, as he notes.
In any case, as Dator's article suggests, the "decolonisation" of the future starts and ends with our own taking of responsibility for reimagining society. It's not *whether* we address this stuff in a classroom (or in classrooms everywhere, for that matter) that endangers the imagining of distinctive futures, but *how*.
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