Select campus:UKDubai
University of Birmingham
Menu

Forging futures

People do what they do expecting an effect. However, different understandings of temporality and the future can inform different forms of engagement. From active response to anticipated developments to approaches focused on philosophical reflection, waiting and the avoidance of harm.

Understanding different aspects of future-orientation is a key focus for DASA staff. We have analysed gendered aspirations, predictive practices, activist narratives, justice seeking, post-and anti-work discourses, and the testing of future-strategies in gambling practices. DASA researchers take a keen interest in how an orientation towards the future effects both research practices in anthropology and the objective of anthropology itself, e.g. through anthropological predictions.

Researchers

Academic staff

  • Juliet Gilbert: youth studies, religion, insecure livelihoods, and aspects of popular culture (fashion, beauty pageants, mobile phones)
  • Jessica Johnson: social anthropology specialising in Southern Africa, anthropology of gender and law in Malawi.
  • Fuad Musallam: The Middle East; migrant labour; urban life; activism and social movements; political subjectivity/imagination; affect and emotion; temporality and futurity.
  • Anthony Pickles: Economic anthropology, Oceania, gambling, political anthropology, anthropology of the future, anthropology of finance, anthropology of elites
  • Marco Di Nunzio: lived experiences of marginality and dispossession, the politics of city-building, architecture and professional ethics, authoritarianism, activism, work, the street economy and everyday forms of resistance.

Doctoral research

  • If you are interested in pursuing a PhD related to Forging Futures, please contact a member of staff above.

Projects

 

Publications

Monographs and other books

  • Fuad Musallam, A Break in the Future: Feeling Like an Activist after the Arab Uprisings (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).

  • Gilbert, J. forthcoming, Fashioning Futures: Uncertainty and young women's livelihoods in urban Nigeria. International African Library, Cambridge University Press.

  • Johnson, J. and G. Karekwaivanane (eds) 2018. Pursuing Justice in Africa: Competing Imaginaries and Contested Practices. (Ohio University Press)

Articles and book chapters

  • Musallam, F., 2025. A Break in the Future: Feeling Like an Activist After the Arab Uprisings. University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Pickles, A.J., 2024. ‘Gambling crowds as crypto-oracles? Bridging the real and the blockchain through utopian markets and oracular shenanigans’, in Matan Shapiro (ed.) Crowd Dynamics on the Blockchain: Singularities and Multiplicities, New York: Berghahn, 66-83.
  • Pickles, Anthony J., 2024. ‘Gambling on Our Present’, in the collection ‘Back to the Present’, edited by Timothy Cooper, Michael Edwards and Nikita Simpson, American Ethnologist Online.
  • Sprenger, G., Pickles, A. J., Gershon, I., Robbins, J., Bryant, R., and Strathern, M. (2023). Expectations of the Gift: Toward a Future-Oriented Taxonomy of Transactions: Article with comments and response. Social Analysis 67, 1, 70-124  [Accessed 23 January 2025]
  • Di Nunzio M. 2022 “Work, development and the politics of refusal in urban Ethiopia”. American Ethnologist, 49(3): 401 - 412
  • Musallam, F. & Zagaria, V (eds). 2021. 'Political Engagements in the Moment and After the Fact’. Allegra Lab. 
  • Musallam, F. ‘“Failure in the Air”: Activist Narratives, In-Group Storytelling, and Keeping Political Possibility Alive in Lebanon’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1 (2019): 30–47.
  • Johnson, J. 2018. ‘Feminine futures: female initiation and aspiration in matrilineal Malawi’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) 24 (4): 786-803
  • Gilbert, J 2016, '‘They’re my Contacts, not my Friends’: Reconfiguring Affect and Aspirations Through Mobile Communication in Nigeria', Ethnos: journal of anthropology.
  • Di Nunzio, M. 2015. ‘Embracing Uncertainty. Young people on the move in Addis Ababa’s inner city’, in Cooper L., Pratten D. (eds) Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 149 – 172
  • Pickles, A., 2014. Gambling futures: playing the imminent in highland Papua New Guinea. In Pacific Futures Projects, Politics and Interests.

Media

Events

  • 2024 Ticket to the Future: Can you predict the politics of the future? Event held at PeopleFest and organised by Anthony Pickles and Fuad Musallam
  • 2019 Propositions of the (non)urban: dancing the future away. The 2018-19 DASA Fage Lecture by Abdoumaliq Simone, University of Sheffield