For some time, the term hauntology has been used in the arts, in academia, and in wider culture. It is often used as a kind of shorthand for the persistence of older elements of popular culture that experience a renaissance and so circulate once more like ‘ghosts’ in the public mind. However, there is more to it than that. In its initial usage it was intended to make us think of the loss of potential futures or the way in which our ability to imagine the future is made stagnant by a melancholy caused by living among these ghosts of dead times. What we will ask in this month’s research café is: are all our futures hauntological, recycled twentieth century utopias and dystopias? Or can we imagine other futures and what might they look like?

Free entry but booking required.