I present a preliminary analysis at the level ofnarrative and grammar, by analyzing the use of predictive, imperative, and subjunctiveverb forms in both programmatic and oppositional texts

appily, theseprocesses of imagining have a variety of externalizations—in text, talk, andmaterial objects—that make them amenable to social research

Data sources that tap into the externalization of future projections are quitevaried, although many of them involve spoken and written texts of various sorts.

Narrative approaches

alternative approach is to study narratives about desired and expected futures, aselaborated in various types of texts

While myanalysis is based on hand-coded data, I suggest ways in which this strategy could bescaled up using automated tools for textual coding and analysis

I argue thatfuture projections can be studied via their externalizations in attitudes, narratives,performance, and material forms

Together with a team of graduate students at Rutgers University and the Universityof Notre Dame,8I have been working on the pilot coding of the first eighteendocuments posted under the rubric of“Proposals”on the web portal of the People’sSummit.

study of future projections has been muchmore segmented and fragmentar

At an individual level, these can come from responses to survey questions aboutexpectations and aspirations

ake stock of the methodologicalchallenges involved in studying futures and their effects

In our preliminary read of these documents, we noticed wide variation in thedegree to which they focus on broad, general statements of value (i.e.,“thefuture we want”); on exhortations to action (“what we must do”); on causalpredictions and if-then reasoning; and on detailed strategies of how to get from“here/now”to the“future we want”(or alternatively, how to prevent the futureswe do not want).

different genres of future projection might be put to analytical use in studyingprocesses of interest to social scientists

collective memory

I focus here on survey, narrative, performative approaches, leaving adiscussion of material representations to future work

externalization of future imaginaries through text, talk, and objects isshaped by—and helps to constitute—different contexts of action

With the help of computer-basedautomated coding and natural language processing, we could move on to moresophisticated kinds of text-based pattern analysis

rom in-depth interviews

Survey approaches

These narratives can operate at the individual level(personal accounts of hopes, fears, plans, expectations, and desires) or collective level(e.g., utopian or dystopian writings, institutional planning documents, or ideologicalaccounts of historical change)

I sorted the verbs into three types of orientations, which I call thepredictive,theimperative, and thesubjunctivemodes

At the collective level, we can draw uponmany of these same sources, but add organizational documents, proposals, andreports; newspapers and other media reports; captured websites and other forms ofsocial media; and audio or video transcriptions of conversational interaction. Wecan also examine how projected futures are externalized in material objects ofvarious types, including architecture andurban space, consumer goods, retirementor savings accounts, and symbolic displays of power and protest

Likewise, the other dimensions of projectivity are also subject to empiricalvariation and change over time, and thus can be used as tools in sociologicaldescription and explanation

The classicapproach to this comes from demographers, social psychologists and life courseresearchers, working in the tradition of aspiration and attainment studies

As Paul Ricoeur (1991) notes, suchstories—whether in the form of full blown utopian or ideological narratives, or morefragmentary, vague, and partially formulated scenarios—serve as maps for action andprovide both motivation and orientation (i.e., moral, emotional, and practical guidance).

While measuring these dimensions poses some challenges, it is certainly withinreach, given existing tools for textual analysis

It is possible to have a highlyelaborated (and yet still flexible and contingent) understanding of possibilities in the shortterm, while keeping long term futures vague, narrow, or constrained by rigid teleologies

dentification ofdimensions of variabilityin future-orientednarratives that matter for particular kinds of actions and outcomes

meetings provides aportal into the narrative, performative, and material externalizations of future projectionsoutlined above

These documents represent a rangeof different political perspectives, as well as differentiated access to power, resources, andpolitical influence among the diverse publics that engaged in the conference

In particular, we beganto focus on future-oriented verb tenses, as well as on the subjects and objects of action,temporal markers, future-oriented action verbs, and future-characterizing nouns.

Finally, we have started taking note of action verbs and nouns that offer characteriza-tions of the future and the ways in which we move towards it (or, conversely, how itmoves towards us).

pattern is suggestive enough to pose a number ofinteresting questions for a more extensive analysis (perhaps assisted by automatedtextual analysis). For example,

I have made a number of theoretical arguments and placed somemethodological bets for future researc

Second, I have argued that while some future projections are routinized andimplicit, others are developed through contentious communication, often elabo-rated in what I call“sites of hyperprojectivity.

The approach proposed here can allow us to examine howthe deployment of future-oriented grammars reflect (or, in fact, help to discursivelyconstitute) differential authority, access,and influence in relation to decision-making processes, at various levels of institutional power

While there is an extensive subfield in sociology studying the sources,content, and consequences of collective memory

This leads me to my bet: by analyzing the form and content of futures talk in such sitesof hyperprojectivity, we can understand the mechanisms by which future projectionsaffect decisions, relations, and institutions

ites of heightened, future-oriented public debate aboutpossible futures

Yet while futures imaginaries exist“in our heads,”they are nevertheless subject to avariety of externalizations in text, talk, and material objects, which make them acces-sible to empirical study

These network visualiza‐tions are a flexible tool for exploring relationships, and will play an important role inthe case studies in later chapters.

When human readersapproach a text, we use our understanding of the emotional intent of words to inferwhether a section of text is positive or negative, or perhaps characterized by someother more nuanced emotion like surprise or disgust.

Most operations for finding pairwise counts or correlations need to turn thedata into a wide matrix first.

We can use sentiment analysis to understand how anarrative arc changes throughout its course or what words with emotional and opin‐ion content are important for a particular text.

R packages including coreNLP (Arnold and Tilton 2016), cleanNLP (Arnold 2016),and sentimentr (Rinker 2017) are examples of such sentiment analysis algorithms.For these, we may want to tokenize text into sentences, and it makes sense to use anew name for the output column in such a case.

Using term frequency and inverse document frequency allows us to find words thatare characteristic for one document within a collection of documents, whether thatdocument is a novel or physics text or webpage.

flowchart of a typical text analysis that combines tidytext with other toolsand data formats, particularly the tm or quanteda packages.

Analyzing Narratives

themselves and their worlds to other people (and to themselves).

Narrative analysts study all sorts of texts,including interview transcripts, newspaper articles, speeches, plays, andworks of literature

Still, narrative analysis will ideallyfollow the concept of methodological congruence advanced by Richardsand Morse (2013; see Creswell, 2014, p. 50). Methodological congruencerefers to the purposes, questions, and methods of a research project beinginterconnected and interrelated so that the study appears as a cohesivewhole rather than a collection of independent parts

narrative analysis (or narratology)

Stories bring together many plot elements,including digressions and subplots, in what is known as a process ofemplotment (White, 1978).

Narratives areunderstood to be interpretive devices that people use to represent

quantitativenarrative analysis (QNA)

Structural approaches to narrative analysis operate mainly at a textuallevel of analysis, which is to say they focus on texts themselves rather thanthe social and historical contexts in which stories emerge, circulate, andchange

The functionalist approach to narrative analysis was pioneered by thepsychologist Bruner (1990). Bruner argued that humans’ ordering ofexperience occurs in two basic modes. The first is the paradigmatic mode,or logico–scientific mode.

Sociological narrative analysis analyzes texts as reflections ofcultural, historical, and political contexts in which particularstories are told by particular narrators to particular audiences.Sociological analysis makes use of qualitative research methodsincluding especially comparative historical methods.

The belief is that by means of such sharing, a rich, concrete, complex, and hence truthful account of the social world being studied is pos-sible. Fieldwork is then a means to an end

Ethnographies are obviously experientially driven, in that writ-ers seek to draw directly from their fieldwork in the culture of study

To do fieldwork apparently requires some of the instincts of an exile, for the fieldworker typically arrives at the place of study without much of an introduction and knowing few people, if any.

Finally, all these ethnographic conventions are historically situated and change over time.

The fieldworker must display culture in a narrative, a writ-ten report of the fieldwork experience in self-consciously selected words. Ethnography is the result of fieldwork, but it is the written report that must represent the culture, not the fieldwork itself.

An ethnography is written representation of a culture (or selected aspects of a culture). It carries quite serious intellectual and moral responsibilities, for the images of others inscribed in writing are most assuredly not neutral.

The trick of ethnography is to adequately dis-play the culture (or, more commonly, parts of the culture) in a way that is meaningful to readers without great distortion

Some styles are, at any given time, more acceptable in ethnographic circles than others.

Ethnographic writings can and do in-form human conduct and judgment in innumerable ways by pointing to the choices and restrictions that reside at the very heart of social life

Among social scientists there is a rather persistent conviction that the problems of ethnog• raphy are merely those of access, intimacy, sharp ears and eyes, good habits of recording, and so forth. It is not a straightforward matter, however, because a culture or a cultural practice is as much created by the writing (i.e., it is intangible and can only be put into words) as it determines the writing itself(Wagner, 1981)

My intention in this monograph is to organize and bring to light some often overlooked narrative conventions of ethnography so that different modes of cultural portraiture can be identified, appreciated, compared, and perhaps improved.

There is no direct correspondence be-tween the world as experienced and the world as conveyed in a text, any more than there is a direct correspondence between the observer and the observed.

Field-workers may present themselves as delicately lurking, working, and getting results, but the results they achieve are always experi-entially contingent and highly variable by setting and by person

The most fundamen-tal distinction is that anthropologists go elsewhere to practice their trade while sociologists stay home.

My concern is primarily with the narrative and rhetorical conventions surrounding ethnography and secondarily with the historical.

jargon is often an important part of an ethnographic text. Jargon works, however, in curious and sometimes paradoxical ways. Its use not only represents a writer's claim to membership in an identifiable research club, but also ab-breviates matters of concern for well-versed members of that club

Sociologists have developed a status hierarchy and division of labor where the top rungs are occupied by social theorists who build broad conceptual models for others to test and modify in humble social settings.

the authori-tative interpretations of cultural matters are restricted in range and remain in the hands of the fieldworkers who write the eth-nographies

Part of the flat, dry and sometimes unbearably dull tone of elaborate realist ethnographies is a result of this explicit focus on the regular and often-observed activities of the group under study

Ethnographic fieldwork has never come close to achieving the celebrated status in sociology that it has in anthropology.

Ethnographic writing is far more complex, overlapping, ambiguous, and multifaceted than it is sometimes made to appear in this book

more than one hot and influential in-group within ethnographic circles has become over time a cold and impotent out-group, having fallen victim to its own increasingly beloved but self-deceptive wordsmithing

Little wonder that many sociological fieldworkers pro-duce texts that seem, compared to their anthropological counter-parts, restricted in range, full of jargon, and stuffed with remote facts, as if to satisfy some fetish of documentation or legitimation; they exhibit little interpretive nerve

Interpretive flights of fancy by the fieldworker-author are likely to be of little interest, and any doubts or self-questioning on the part of the writer may be grounds for dismissing the entire work

Selective packaging of field data to exemplify generalized constructs is a standard practice, even though the pre-cise empirical situations in which the field data are developed are perhaps far less coherent or obvious than the concepts they serve to illustrate.

The distinctive, inquisitive, intimate form of inquiry called fieldwork is becoming increasingly popular outside its traditional disciplinary and relatively insular bounda-ries

Concern for the ar-rangement and literary quality of ethnographic reports appears to be growing among fieldworkers

Formal techniques have also been developed to help shape the native's point of view into something reportable. Ethnoscience is one popular method (Tyler, 1969; Spradley, 1979). Ethnomethodologi-cal enactments of sense-making practices of members of a culture is another (Garfinkel, 1965; Leiter, 1980; Lynch, 198 5). Both are controversial.

the social scientists who sometimes turn to ethno-graphic literature to fill out their own studies are seen as a rather unsophisticated bunch by fieldworkers.

Used carelessly, jargon obscured, covers up, and otherwise hides froiD view matters that might well be ambiguous, poorly understood, or contestable

Most confessions, like most dissertations, never see publication. Those that are published, however, normally issue from authors who have first published notable, attention-getting tales in the realist tradition

Most confessions, like most dissertations, never see publication.

Readers from outside fieldwork traditions look to ethnographers for the information they supply on the group studied

increasing interest by fieldworkers in the social philosophies of hermeneutics and phenomenology, philosophies that blur, if they do not demolish, the subject-object distinction

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of ethnographic realism is the almost complete absence of the author from most segments of the finished text.

Collections of autobiographical reflections on past projects represent the most common outlet for confessional tales of the field.

Of note, too, is the realist convention of suppressing the indi-vidual in the tale in favor of programmatically constructing an en-tity to serve as a kind of cultural prototype.

There is also a sort of metatheory that runs through ethno-graphic tales (of all sorts) and that bears mention. Such meta~ theory is tuned to the intellectual fashions of the day, and authors may be only dimly aware of its influence on their writing

Thus matters of the reliability and va-lidity of the data assumed some importance. More recently, with the failure or, at least, the demise of positivist social theory and the increased importance of the problem of meaning, fieldworkers are more likely to cover their claims of realism on the more commonsensical grounds of naturalism and interpretive expertise

Attracting a general readership involves more than coverage and apparent simplification

Ethnogra-phies of any sort are always subject to multiple interpretations. They are never beyond controversy or debate.

The tone suggests anonymity, a characteristic of science writing, where the fieldworker is self-cast as a busy but unseen little fellow who is confident that the world as represented in the writing is the real one

When viewed as literary crea-tions, realist tales may not seem so very real at all. At times they seem like cheeky appropriations that rest on mystified technique.

Much confessional work is done to convince the audience of the human qualities of the fieldworker. Often the ethnographer mentions personal biases, character flaws, or bad habits as a way of building an ironic self-portrait with which the readers can iden-tify

Self-reflection and doubt are hardly central matters in real-ist tales.

Details are in a sense precoded in a realist ethnography to serve as instances of something impor-tant, usually a structural or procedural unit (i.e., precept) the fieldworker has "discovered" in the field (or, more recently, devel-oped by way of "readings" taken in the field).

To do ethnography in the realist mode these days is to offer the perspective as well as practices of the member of the culture.

Though confessional writers are forthcoming with accounts of errors, misgivings, limit-ing research roles, and even misperceptions, they are unlikely to come to the conclusion that they have been misled dramatically, that they got it wrong, or that they have otherwise presented falsehoods to their trusting audience

The first orientation lends itself nicely to a cognitive, rule-based and behaviorally focused ethnographic display; the second to a more reflexive, language-based, inter-pretive one

The confessional tale has become, as I argued earlier, an institu-tionalized and popular form of fieldwork writing

Current ethnographies are most frequently constructed by field workers who make comparatively short visits to the field, con-fine themselves to highly selected aspects of the culture studied, and make tightly focused interpretations of definitionally-specific topics

The narrator speaks for the group studied as a passive observer who roams imperialistically across the setting to tell of events that happen in this way or that

Confessional ethnographies are ordinarily vague on such mat-ters, for being precise may raise anxious questions for the reader about who is doing all the ethnographic work, anyway?

attempt to demonstrate that an ethnographic report is more than a personal document; that it is something disciplined by proper fieldwork habits, including the attention an ethnographer pays to the epistemological problems characteristic of social science

The avowed purpose, of course, is to lift the veil of public secrecy surrounding fieldwork

Collections of autobiographical reflections on past projects represent the most common outlet for confessional tales of the field.

ome confessional writers are not at all interested in reestablishing and confirming orthodox views on the scientific charter of fieldwork.

The confessional tale is often a response to some of the realist conventions that have proved most embarrassing. In some in-stances, the confessional tale stems from the notorious sensitivity of many fieldworkers to aspersions cast on the scientific status of their undertakings

Much of the confessional genre is familiar to readers of method texts where the various pros and cons of intense involvement or participation in the culture of interest are discussed

A good deal of recent confessional work rests on what many (myself included) take to be a fundamental turning point in Ameri-can social thought. No longer is the social world, as mentioned in chapter 1, to be taken for granted as merely out there full of neu-tral, objective, observable facts.

In various ways, some mentioned in chapters I and 2, the implications of phe-nomenology, hermeneutics, semiotics, and other intrepretive pro-cedures are being felt in the empirical trenches

Some con-fessions are therefore an attempt to shore up the fieldwork craft as a still scientifically valid one

An often-stated platitude (however infrequently it is treated as such) notes that fieldworkers are only as good as their informants

At issue is the fact that there are always many ways to interpret cultural data. Each interpretation can be disputed on many grounds.

Confessionals do not usually replace realist accounts.

Field data are constructed from talk and ac-tion. They are then interpretations of other interpretations and are mediated many times over-by the fieldworker's own stan-dards of relevance for what is of interest; by the historically situ-ated queries put to informants; by the norms current in the field-worker's professional community for what is proper work; by the self-reflection demanded of both the fieldworker and the infor· mant; by the intentional and unintentional ways a fieldworker or informant is misled; and by the fieldworker's mere presence on the scene as an observer and participant.

some confessional tales are written explicitly to question the very basis of ethnographic authority and to transform ethnography, insofar as possible, into a more philo-sophical, artistic, phenomenological, or political craft; a craft sensitive to matters thought by these writers to be more relevant and important than what ethnography provided to readers in the past.

Both confessional and realist accounts often suggest the not-so-gentle irony that members (or at least most of them) know their culture less well than the fieldworker.

Unmasking fieldwork is a relatively recent phenomenon. A generation (perhaps two) of fieldworkers, in both anthropology and sociology, apparently felt no great urge to enlighten their readers as to what canny tricks of the trade carried them through their respective research projects

The textual organization of the standard con-fessional tale may be of some help for fieldworkers who regard participant-observation as a metaphor best reformulated in her-meneutic terms: a dialectic between experience and interpretation.

What makes the story worth telling is its presumably out of the ordinary or unique character. Impressionist tales are not about what usually happens but about what rarely happens.

Impressionist tales, as noted, remain very much a subgenre of ethnographic writing.

First, much of the traditional authority claimed for fieldwork by its early promoters and justified by them on the basis of their establishing ethnography as a human and behavioral science, akin to the observing natural sciences, has worn thin

some confessional tales are written explicitly to question the very basis of ethnographic authority and to transform ethnography, insofar as possible, into a more philo-sophical, artistic, phenomenological, or political craft; a craft sensitive to matters thought by these writers to be more relevant and important than what ethnography provided to readers in the past.

As fieldworkers consider and report their practices, confessional tales grow more complex and sophisticated

Currently, impressionist tales of the published sort are often buried within realist or confessional ones and are thus something of a subgenre and a marginal type of ethnographic writing.

The magic of telling impressionist tales is that they are always unfinished. With each retelling, we discover more of what we know.

The intention is not to tell readers what to think of an experience but to show them the experience from beginning to end and thus draw them immediately into the story to work out its problems and puzzles as they unfold

For my purposes, it is the impressionists' self-conscious and, for their time, innovative use of their materials-color, form, light, stroke, hatching, over-lay, frame-that provides the associative link to fieldwork writing

Impressionist tales are the "kitchen sink" reports of past events that took place in the field. They allow fieldworkers to dump all sorts of odd facts and speculations into a shaggy narrative

A stance must be chosen to help shape the lead character's action simply as a way of making the tale easier to tell and, at least to the fieldworker, attractive

The form of an impressionist tale is dramatic recall.

Impressionist tales can stand alone with or without elaborate framing devices or extensive commentary. There are in the telling of tales many opportunities, of course, for the fieldworker-author to slip out of the story and make an analytic point or two.

Knowing a culture, even our own, is a never-ending story.

Transparency and concreteness give the impres-sionist tale an absorbing character, as does the use of a maximally evocative language.

The audience cannot know in advance what matters will prove instructive, and thus by trying to hang on to the little details of the tale, they experience something akin to what the fieldworker might have experienced during the narrated events.

Finally, since the standards are not disciplinary but literary ones, the main obligation of the impressionist is to keep the audi-ence alert and interested

Writers of realist tales, as sug-gested in earlier chapters, no longer treat observation alone with the same respect as previous generations did.

In telling a tale, narrative rationality is of more concern than an argumen-tative kind. The audience cannot be concerned with the story's correctness, since they were not there and cannot know if it is correct. The standards are largely those of interest (does it at-tract?), coherence (does it hang together?), and fidelity (does it seem true?)

Stories are not made from common and .routine occurrences. Impressionist tales suggest that we learn more from the exceptional than from the topical. In some quarters this is heresy.

ethnography has also become very sophisti-cated in terms of its emerging understandings of the practical, philosophical, and epistemological problems facing those who choose to study the social world

ethnographers continue to be drawn to strange places with the intention of making them familiar.

Impressionist tales typically highlight the episodic, complex, and ambivalent realities that are frozen and perhaps made too pat and ordered by realist or confessional conventions.

Realism in fieldwork reports remains a laudable and thoroughly respectable goal.

Critical Tales

Critical tales often have a Marxist edge and a concern for rep-resenting social structure as seen through the eyes of disadvan-taged groups in advanced (and not-so-advanced) capitalist coun-tries.

Cultural representations are left open and are subject to debate by fieldworkers and informants alike. This is not because the methods at our disposal are imprecise or weak, but because such ambiguity is an accurate characterization oflived cultural ex-perience

Formal Tales

The mark of a critical tale is, again, the conscious selection of a strategically situ-ated culture in which to locate one's fieldwork

Jointly Told Tales

Literary Tales

The main reason: the wide-ranging architectural landmark protection provisions governing the Linzer Tabakfabrik and the resultant high costs of maintaining its physical substance.