Fixing Futures

In 2024 the Ethnography Studio became an international collaborator of the Fixing Futures research training group (RTG) at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany.

Contemporary societies are confronted with novel constellations of political, economic, and ecological challenges ranging from global warming and pandemic outbreaks to refugee crises and financial meltdowns. When anticipating contingent futures, societies tend to rely increasingly on “technological fixes,” investing them with the capacity of averting or solving future problems. Taking up insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Fixing Futures sets out to empirically examine how “fixing futures” works in technologies of anticipation. Over the course of five years, twenty PhD students and two postdocs will investigate different dimensions of future-making practices, focusing on economic practices, modes of government, and processes of life as the main research areas. 

As part of the collaboration, several members (PhDs and PIs) of Fixing Futures, who are also part of a research project entitled Tracing Data Politics, visited the Ethnography Studio in the fall of 2024 for a workshop titled Missing, Underappreciated, Found. In summer 2025, Andrea Ballestero visited Goethe for Part II of the workshop. Across both workshops, participants explored how transitional knowledge devices like charts, legal frameworks, or datasets become companions in the making of ethnographic research questions, encounters, and claims.