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This chapter explores the re-workings of Homeric epic narrative and ancient classical myth by the British poet Kate Tempest, including the epic poem Brand New Ancients (2013), and the poem sequence Hold Your Own (2014). Tempest uses the poetic medium to formulate future possibilities for those excluded from the political and economic processes shaping the future and to stage the intersubjective encounter characterizing both selfhood and literary engagement. By urging readers and audience to view themselves not as passive citizen-consumers veering towards an open future being shaped by everyone but them, but instead as profoundly mythical beings capable of 'everyday odysseys', Tempest's work constitutes a call for people to become invested in a future they will help to shape. This, in turn, points the way to a creative future that re-establishes literature as an urgent, socially relevant practice and a potentially transformative tool for social and political change.

Drawing on Clare Hemmings' work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl's Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann's Axolotl Roadkill (2010) and Antonia Baum's Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] (2011). I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists' configuration of the self-empowered "individual." Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.

This paper employs the figure of the "interface" to explore the work of German feminist rapper and spoken-word performer Sookee (Nora Hantzsch), who constitutes an ideal case-study for examining the interface between digital technologies, transnational feminisms, and local activism. Sookee is an underground hip-hop artist and queer political activist in Berlin, a location which features in her work as a site of subcultural dissent and contested identities. Sookee is also an academic; a youth outreach worker; a significant online presence; and an international creative collaborator. As such, she navigates the interfaces between multiple social groups, media, discourses, and cultural contexts—regional, national, and transnational. This article focuses on the digital circulations of Sookee's material against the backdrop of her local performative and activist work. Her transnational collaborations with women MCs and poets from South Africa and America, as well as Europe, celebrate cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic difference by bringing in a diverse range of feminist voices to the German context.

When, in the mid-2000s, a number of pop-feminist essayistic volumes appeared in Germany, their authors expressed the desire to reinvigorate feminism for a new generation of young women. Their texts focus in part on the continuing need to ensure equal democratic rights for young women in terms of equal pay, reproductive capacities and child care. Yet they simultaneously register their dissatisfaction with the legacy of the New Feminism and, more specifically, with the role models it produced. Although in their written interventions these new German pop-feminists often draw on the generic and rhetorical strategies of their feminist forebears, they employ the generational metaphor as a means of producing a narrative of 'progress' (Hemmings, 2011) which signifies a departure from previous feminist discourses and firmly 'others' their exponents. This type of narrative resonates troublingly with wider social and political narratives which situate feminism firmly in the past. Strikingly, German pop-feminist volumes share the deployment of this progress narrative with similar publications in Britain and the US. Yet the German volumes generally — and uniquely in relation to those three contexts — avoid textual engagement with the writing and protagonists of the first women's movement in Germany. This section of the article examines the feminist historiographical narratives told in pop-feminist volumes across all three contexts, enquiring after the local specificities of generational thinking, its caesurae, emphases and omissions, and revealing the broader transnational commonalities — and political implications — of feminist stories.

This volume explores the recent phenomenon of 'pop-feminism' and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany and examines what feminist politics look like in the twenty-first century

Featuring chapters from an international range of leading and emerging scholars, this Handbook provides a collection of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research that sheds new light on contemporary futures studies. Engaging with key defining questions of the early twenty-first century such as climate change, big data, AI, the future of economics, education, mental health, cities and more, the Handbook provides a review and synthesis of futures scholarship, highlighting the role that societies can and should play in their making. While the various chapters demonstrate how futures emerge and take shape in particular places at particular times, the distinctive insight provided by the volume overall is that futures thinking today must be social and contextual. By presenting a range of futures work from contexts around the globe, the Handbook contextualizes techniques - forecasting, backcasting, scenario planning, collaboration and co-production- to ask how different dimensions of the social are created and circulated in the process. Through its thirty chapters, the volume explores and interrogates narratives, anticipations, enactments, ecologies, collaborations, prospections and so on to highlight which versions of the social are legitimized and which are encouraged and foreclosed. This Handbook opens an important conversation about the centrality of the social in futures thinking. By bringing arts, humanities and social sciences scholars and practitioners into conversation with biologists, environmental, climate and computer scientists, this volume seeks to encourage new pathways across, between and within multiple disciplines to interrogate the futures we need and want. The social must be our starting point if we are to steer our planet in a direction that supports good lives for the many, everywhere.

This report describes a day that was dedicated to thinking about post-antibiotic futures through trialling 3 different 'Creative Futures' methods with a group of participants from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds. The event was co-organised by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and the Institute for Social Futures (ISF) at Lancaster University, where it took place on 16 January 2020. The workshop was funded by DSTL's Future Threat Understanding and Disruption (FTUD) Programme and was designed to allow exploratory interdisciplinary collaboration that might open up new ways of thinking and planning for all involved. Reading this report will give insight into: (1) the background science that makes living in a world where antibiotics are no longer effective a plausible future worthy of consideration within the FTUD Programme; (2) three novel Creative Futures methods that were used to tease out possible unforeseen social, political and ecological consequences of such an emergent environment and stimulate new kinds of crossdisciplinary exchange: the Consequences game, Narrative World Building, and combining Three Horizons with Verge; (3) key insights that participants gained from the day, including future possible development of both the topic at hand and the methods used to explore it.