This volume brings together philosophers, social theorists, and theologians in order to investigate the relation between future(s) of the Revolution and future(s) of the Reformation. It offers reflections on concepts and interpretations of revolution and reformation that are relevant for the analysis of future-oriented political practices and political theologies of the present time.

It has become a critical commonplace that postmodernism no longer serves as an adequate designation for contemporary literature. But what comes after postmodernism? What are the tendencies and directions within contemporary American literature that promise to shape its future? The contributions to this book are written in the shadows of ‘new media’, a turn towards the nonhuman in critical thinking, and a surge in environmental and apocalyptic thought. Engaging with such contemporary debates, the authors map the rapidly changing ecosystem of contemporary literary genres and forms and attend to transformations in the production, reception, and circulation of books. This book takes for granted that American literature does have a future, although whatever this future holds, it is unlikely to be what we expect. At this historical juncture, the American novel seems to carve its future though an engagement with issues at the forefront of our present, thereby ensuring its own ongoing contemporaneity. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.

This book discusses how the ways that young people’s educational trajectories into and beyond lower secondary education are regulated can influence their future lives. It draws on the results of empirical studies in eight European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom (England and Northern Ireland), carried out under the EU-funded GOETE project. The book explores the different ways that educational trajectories are – actively or passively – conceptualised, negotiated and organised in the individual countries, and the ways that these shape educational opportunities and life chances. Its central aims are to elaborate the different ways in which educational trajectories are governed in the eight countries, and to compare the differences between those approaches and their outcomes in the eight countries. It focuses on the relationships between the different (national and local) forms and outcomes of interactions between collective and individual actors, structures, institutions, mechanisms, and discourses that exert influence on education policy and practice at various levels: inter- and trans-national, nation-state, regional, local or school levels. The chapters are organised in two parts. Part One develops and discusses the conceptual framework that drove the empirical analyses of the governance of educational trajectories. Part Two discusses different ways in which the spatial/scalar, discursive and institutional dimensions of the governance of educational trajectories affect the educational experiences and life courses of the young people in the eight countries. These chapters focus on different aspects of those experiences, such as issues of access to and coping within educational settings, the role of parents and students in the processes and consequences of transitions, provision for supporting migrant students, and conceptions of the relevance of education. Overall, the comparative approach to governance adopted in the volume makes it possible to identify key sources and consequences of the similarities and differences of the approaches to, and practices of, educational transitions adopted in the eight countries.

Essays on speculative/science fiction explore the futures that feed our most cherished fantasies and terrifying nightmares, while helping diverse communities devise new survival strategies for a tough millennium. The explosion in speculative/science fiction (SF) across different media from the late twentieth century to the present has compelled those in the field of SF studies to rethink the community’s identity, orientation, and stakes. In this edited collection, more than forty writers, critics, game designers, scholars, and activists explore core SF texts, with an eye toward a future in which corporations dominate both the means of production and the means of distribution and governments rely on powerful surveillance and carceral technologies. The essays, international in scope, demonstrate the diversity of SF through a balance of popular mass-market novels, comics, films, games, TV shows, creepypastas, and more niche works. SF works explored range from Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, 2084: The End of the World by Boualem Sansal, Terra Nullius by Claire Coleman, Watchmen and X-Men comics, and the Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier, to the MaddAddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin, and the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson. In an era in which ecological disaster and global pandemics regularly expose and intensify deep political-economic inequalities, what futures has SF anticipated? What survival strategies has it provided us? Can it help us to deal with, and grow beyond, the inequalities and injustices of our times? Unlike other books of speculative/science fiction criticism, Uneven Futures uses a think piece format to make its critical insights engaging to a wide audience. The essays inspire visions of better possible futures—drawing on feminist, queer, and global speculative engagements with Indigenous, Latinx, and Afro- and African futurisms—while imparting important lessons for political organizing in the present. Contributors: Ben Abraham, Emmet Asher-Perrin, Brent Ryan Bellamy, Gerry Canavan, Andrew Ferguson, Fabio Fernandes, Dexter Gabriel, M. Elizabeth Ginway, Sean Guynes, Ouissal Harize, David M. Higgins, Veronica Hollinger, Allanah Hunt, Nicola Hunte, Nathaniel Isaacson, Ayana Jamieson, Darshana Jayemanne, Gwyneth Jones, Brendan Keogh, Sami Ahmad Khan, Cameron Kunzelman, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, Isiah Lavender III, Caryn Lesuma, Karen Lord, Sarah Marrs, Farah Mendlesohn, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Hugh Charles O’Connell, B. Pladek, John Rieder, Lysa Rivera, Kim Stanley Robinson, Steven Shaviro, Rebekah Sheldon, Alison Sperling, Alfredo Suppia, Bogi Takács, Taryne Jade Taylor, Sherryl Vint, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Ida Yoshinaga.

Modernity in the late eighteenth century transformed all domains of European life -intellectual, industrial, and social. Not least affected was the experience of time itself: ever-accelerating change left people with briefer intervals of time in which to gather new experiences and adapt. In this provocative and erudite book Reinhart Koselleck, a distinguished philosopher of history, explores the concept of historical time by posing the question: what kind of experience is opened up by the emergence of modernity? Relying on an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts from politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets to Renaissance paintings and the dreams of German citizens during the Third Reich, Koselleck shows that, with the advent of modernity, the past and the future became 'relocated' in relation to each other.The promises of modernity -freedom, progress, infinite human improvement -produced a world accelerating toward an unknown and unknowable future within which awaited the possibility of achieving utopian fulfillment. History, Koselleck asserts, emerged in this crucial moment as a new temporality providing distinctly new ways of assimilating experience. In the present context of globalization and its resulting crises, the modern world once again faces a crisis in aligning the experience of past and present. To realize that each present was once an imagined future may help us once again place ourselves within a temporality organized by human thought and humane ends as much as by the contingencies of uncontrolled events.

Cultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of ›futures worth preserving‹. The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.

This volume has been produced to mark the retirement of Roy Foster from the Carroll Professorship of Irish history at the University of Oxford, and to mark his extraordinary career as a historian, literary critic, and public intellectual. It consists of twenty three essays contributed by many of the leading historians of modern Ireland, including scholars whose work has influenced Roy Foster's own research, leading Irish historians who have influenced and have been influenced by Foster, and younger scholars who were supervised and/or mentored by Roy and whose work he greatly admires. Essays chart Foster's career while reflecting on developments in the field of Irish history writing, teaching, and research since the 1970s. Focussing on the history of Ireland since 1800, these essays cover a wide spectrum of topics and ideas including aspects of the Irish land question, generational and intellectual tensions, political biography, and social and cultural change.