Sociology of the Future: Promising Areas of Research in a Society of “Permanent Risk”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2026.5.3519Keywords:
sociology of the future, future studies, uncertainty, risk society, social forecastingAbstract
This article opens a special issue of the Journal dedicated to sociological and interdisciplinary research on the future. The authors trace the evolution of research focusing on the future and forecasting from literary utopias and the philosophy of history to futurology, social forecasting, and contemporary futures studies, and highlight the contradictions that shape the construction of visions of the future in turbulent and post-conflict societies. They further identify promising avenues for current scholarly research, including the analysis of practices for coping with uncertainty and developing long-term orientations; the interplay between collective memory, collective trauma, and visions of the future; the study of the social imagination, various forms of optimism and pessimism, and inequalities in the capacity to construct the future; as well as the strategic ignoring of knowledge about the future, visions of a climate-changed future, and the impact of generative artificial intelligence on how the future is envisioned. The final section of the article provides an overview of the studies included in this special issue.
Acknowledgments. The authors express their sincere gratitude to the Journal’s Chief Editor, Valery Fedorov, for the concept behind this thematic issue and for his collaboration on it. They also thank Alexander Shirov (Institute of Economic Forecasting of the Russian Academy of Sciences) for his contribution to the expert review of the submissions received by the Journal.
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