Imagining the Future in the Anthropocene

This lecture brings into dialogue two pieces of fiction, a novel and a short story written over one hundred years apart: Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Camille Stories (2016) by Donna Haraway. It argues that both texts place care at the centre of social life, imagining societies structured around interrelation and interdependence rather than competition or coercion. While Herland envisions a female-centred utopia grounded in practices of care and social cohesion, The Camille Stories extends care beyond the human, foregrounding ecological entanglement and multispecies kinship in the after-math of environmental collapse. Each author, in her own way, proposes narratives that challenge en-trenched dualities in Western modern thought: a) the dichotomy between rational thought and emotions, b) the tension between individual and collective, and c) the division between reproductive and produc-tive labour. At the same time, both envision social constellations in which relations of care become the primary mode of engagement and the structuring principle of society.
 

Natàlia Cantó-Milà, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC-IN3). Her research interests encompass social theory, relational sociol-ogy, the sociology of emotions, environmental humanities, qualitative research methods, and imagi-naries of the future. She serves as the editor-in-chief of Digithum, an indexed journal specializing in relational perspectives on culture and society. Her recent publications include: "Between temporalities, imaginaries and imagination: A framework for analysing futures,” European Journal of Social Theory, 27(2), 298–313 (2024); “Emotion memories and emotional expressions in autobiographical interviews,” Emotions and Society, 6(1), 115–132 (2024); “Researching imaginaries of the future as a tool for en-gendering grounded utopias for individual and social transformation and empowerment in educational environments,” Artnodes, (2022).