Futures work: Liliana Doganova (2024) Discounting the future: The ascendency of a political technology (Zone Books)

Abstract

This paper utilizes Liliana Doganova’s book (Discounting the future: The ascendancy of a political technology, 2024, Zone Books) to explore the provocations science and technology studies scholars have generated by engaging with futures politics. This includes politics of inclusion and exclusion, value composition, embodied constraints and efforts to challenge taken-for-granted future pathways. These politics and their extensions are then considered through Doganova’s work. The paper concludes with an exploration of the conflicting political and temporal domains of valuation built into discounted cash flow formulas.