Presidential Address: Whose Future/s?

Across our shared fields, departments in religion are closing and graduate programs throughout the humanities are forcibly constricted to barely functional levels. Larger political agendas are calling curricula committed to global diversity into question and schools committed to social justice are under threat. The future is therefore a pressing question for AAR members at every level.  The issue is much larger than survival of past practices, it is a challenge of imagination and creativity that - I propose - we are uniquely qualified to pursue in the task of building innovative, and ultimately sustainable academic and public homes for our scholarship.  In this presidential address I explore some theories of “futuring” that may help in addressing this moment. We cannot proceed in a “business as usual” fashion and so I ask what each of us can imagine beyond the usual.  The American Academy of Religion is a member-run organization that is lean in material resources.  However, if we use it, we have great power in networking and the collective creativity of our members.  What are the ways that future thinking can galvanize creativity in scholarship, in public action, and in the AAR itself?