This essay examines Professor Phil Graham's contributions to the critical study of “futurology,” that is, the creation and use of projections of the future by elite social actors and institutions. Professor Graham was one of the first to examine the linguistic constitution and ideological implications of futurological projections within neoliberal discourses. I review this work and situate it within the broader field of Critical Futures Studies (CFS), a line of inquiry which seeks to interrogate and challenge dominant projections of the (...) future. Specifically, I outline key concerns raised by both CFS and Graham concerning the impact technocratic practices and discourses of neoliberalism have on conceptions of the future. I then review the analytic approach underlying Graham's work, as well as specific contributions and insights his analyses offer critical futures scholarship. (shrink)

This article explores communicative aspects of preparing others, by studying prenatal education classes in which midwives prepare expectant parents for delivery. Data include documentation from classes and interviews with the presenters. This twofold dataset enables investigation into how ideologies of communication figure into the production of discourse. A dominant idea is that discourse can stand in for lived experience in the endeavor to decrease nervousness and fear in the expectant parents. The observation data are therefore analyzed by paying attention to (...) how the expectant parents’ future deliveries are discursively represented. Drawing on the conceptual framework for analyzing anticipatory discourse, the study shows how the midwives largely frame this future as predictable and the mother as highly agentive. When addressing unexpected turbulence, however, the midwives use the opportunity to stress the agency of medical professionals to maintain a representation of the delivery event as generally predictable. (shrink)

Departing from the view that genres are regulative as well as constitutive of social action, this article explores the interconnectedness of genres and Discourses that transit generic boundaries. Situating the study in a local energy transition project in Denmark and exploring what happens in a series of citizen meetings without a narrowly defined agenda, I argue that the meetings may be seen as a nexus of genres constituted by a tissue of interwoven Discourses with a lifespan that extends beyond the (...) specific communicative moment. I understand a nexus of genres as a point where genres in a wider sense meet and interact. Relating the Discourses initiated by the participating citizens to the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics, I analyse topics made salient by actors participating in the citizen meetings. By following these topics intertextually across generic boundaries, I identify Discourses that are mutually entangled and genres that are taken up in the process. These include anticipatory Discourse, Discourse of legitimation, Discourse of motivation, Discourse about technology and Discourse about energy saving initiatives or in other words Discourses that exceed the boundaries of the specific genre in which they are realized. (shrink)

This article presents a corpus linguistic analysis of the development in future-oriented political journalism in four Danish newspapers in the period 1997–2013. Keyword analysis and concordance analysis are applied within a framework of grammatical-semantic theory of tense and modal verbs and semantic-pragmatic theory of time meaning, modality and speech acts. The results suggest, unexpectedly, that the newspapers – and news reports in particular – seem to have become less future-oriented in the period. At the same time, however, the articles – (...) and particularly news commentary, in itself increasing – might have become slightly more speculative. Thus, the journalists themselves have become the main source of ‘guessing’, that is, predicting and speculating, with the keywords vil and ville, including unreal and counterfactual speculations in the past tenses. (shrink)