Call for Papers 1-2026 History and Future
Already in Herodotus, the future appeared as a moral and cyclical horizon from which moral lessons were derived. His work is justified insofar as it seeks to preserve for posterity the memory of the Greeks and their great deeds. This idea was consolidated by Cicero in the notion of historia magistra vitae, which understands history as a moral instrument to guide future actions. In its modern sense, however, it was at the end of the eighteenth century that the future emerged as telos, that is, as the ultimate point of a historical process. Throughout the nineteenth century, this teleological future was consolidated as a horizon of expectation grounded in progress, reason, and emancipation. Whether through a liberal teleology of progress, a conservative nationalist teleology, or a revolutionary teleology inspired by socialism, the nineteenth century witnessed the consolidation of the “historical chronotope” as a process in which the future played a guiding role.
From the interwar period onward, however, the various forms of modern teleology began to be questioned across the sciences, humanities, and arts. Combining the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School challenged the teleology of progress by formulating the paradox of an increasingly enlightened age that nevertheless succumbed to the barbarism of war. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, postmodernism—infused with French post-structuralism—announced the “crisis of grand narratives” and the “end of history,” a diagnosis from which presentisms, accelerationisms, actualisms, and post-humanisms emerged. Far from being the space of progress and emancipation, the future appeared here as the non-contingent and the unimaginable. Indeed, the different strands unfolding from the so-called “crisis of history,” reacting both to postmodernism and to the linguistic turn, may be evaluated according to their degree of openness to the future, ranging from radical distrust to a sense of urgency about thinking what comes next. Thus, once the future lost the guiding role it was given in modern thought, it became necessary to think other futures—not necessarily auspicious ones, but capable of overcoming the stagnation of historical thought in the face of the demand to imagine change. To overcome the future, to imagine oneself “after the future,” to recall Franco Berardi and his work After the Future, also means to historicize its disappearance. What were these futures that no longer exist? How does understanding their “slow cancellation”—as discussed by Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life—help us think about the present and, from here, other possible futures?
Moreover, the relationship between history and the future has proven to be one of the most challenging questions for contemporary theory of history and historiographical practice. The acceleration of ecological, technological, and social crises has called into question the traditional function of history as a discipline devoted to the study of the past. As Zoltán Boldizsár Simon has stated, “History begins in the future.” Progressive and linear temporalities have given way to multiple and transversal temporalities; the future has ceased to be merely a projection and has become an ethical imperative; epistemological questions about how to know and understand the past have given way to questions about how we coexist, relate to one another, and inhabit the planet, highlighting the ethico-political responsibility of the historian. This shift in how we conceive the future has provoked a radical transformation in how we define historical thinking and practice, as well as their relationship with other fields and with non-disciplinary and non-Western forms of being and knowing. How can we think historically when the future increasingly presents itself as a horizon of uncertainty and vulnerability? How can we imagine alternative futures in times of crisis?
This special issue proposes to explore the future as an object of historical reflection, articulating it with existential, epistemological, ethical-political, and methodological questions. We seek to gather a diversity of contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
• The future in classical and ancient historiography
• The rise and crisis of modern teleologies
• The crisis of history and the disappearance of the future
• The role of utopias and dystopias in contemporary historical imagination
• The relationship between history, the arts, the sciences, and philosophy in the creation of possible futures
• Perspectives on the future in Indigenous and non-Western thought
• Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives on the future
• The Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and the future of humanity
• The future from the perspective of the environmental humanities
• Posthuman and transhuman futures
• The impact of new technologies (AI, biotechnology) on the redefinition of historicity
Submission deadline | July 31, 2026 Publication | 2026
Submissions via website: https://www.revistas.ufg.br/teoria/about/submissions
Bibliography
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