Jenny Andersson

Project Director (Principal Investigator)

Futurepol was funded by an ERC Starting Grant of 1,350,000 euros awarded to Jenny Andersson in 2012.

Jenny Andersson is CNRS fellow and researcher at the Centre d’études européennes at Sciences Po (CEE). She holds a PhD in Economic History from Uppsala University (2003). Before joining the CNRS and Sciences Po in October 2009, she was post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the European University Institute, Florence, and at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. She was also a research fellow of the Swedish National Scientific Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and an associated professor with the Swedish Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm from 2007-2009.

Jenny has published several works on the transformations on social democracy in the post war period, Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way, published in 2006 by Manchester University Press, and The Library and the Workshop: Social Democracy and Capitalism in an Age of Knowledge, Stanford University Press, 2009. She has also written a number of articles on topics such as the political economy of the knowledge economy, the cultural images of Sweden and the Swedish model, and the origins of futures studies. She also published an early article on the intellectual history of futures studies, in the International Review for Social History entitled “Choosing futures. Alva Myrdal and the construction of Swedish futures studies 1967-1972” (vol. 51, 2006, p. 277-295).

Jenny Andersson was the Principal Investigator of the Futurepol project. Within the project, she did personal research on two core problems. The first consisted in tracing the futurists, the scientists and intellectuals who developed forecasting and futures studies and who were deeply involved not only in producing images of world futures but also in producing the technologies and methods with which they thought that these futures could be shaped. A large documentary effort based on archives in many different countries around the world was undertaken, leading to the constitution of a corpus of hitherto unexploited materials. This was complemented with a network study, which will be published here, as well as a number of oral history interviews with leading futurists which will be deposited as part of a Future archive when the project is finished.

The second study was focused on forms of future governance, in other words a comparative history of the institutions that were developed in the period from the early 1970s to deal with the future. Based on several different national case studies as well as studies of he European level, this has brought out hos institutions intended to govern the long term reproduced notions of the relative weight of public participation versus expert rule in facing long term challenges. Several publications have come out of this study, including “Gouverner le ‘long terme’”, with Pauline Prat, and “Governing the future”, with Anne Greet Keizer.

Andersson co-edits, with Sandra Kemp, the volume Futures (Oxford 21^st Challenges, Oxford University Press).

In 2015, Jenny Andersson has been awarded the CNRS bronze medal for her research.

Forthcoming

The future of the world. Futurists, futurology, and the post cold war World. Winter 2017
Andersson, Jenny. “Prediction and social choice. Daniel Bell and future research”, in The Decicionist Imagination, edited by Nicolas Guilhot and Daniel Bessner. Oxford: Berghahn Press.
Andersson, Jenny. Futures of the State. In Transformations of the state, ed. Patrick Legalès and Desmond King, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Publications

Andersson, Jenny and Sibylle Duhautois. 2016. "Futures of Mankind: The Emergence of the Global Future." InThe Politics of Globality since 1945: Assembling the Planet, ed. Rens Van Munster and Sylvest Casper, 106-125. Oxford: Routledge. The New International Relations Series.
Andersson, Jenny. (2015). “Midwives of the Future: Futurism, Futures Studies and the Shaping of the Global Imagination”. In The Struggle for the Long-term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future (pp. 16-37). Routledge.
Andersson Jenny & Rindzeviciute Egle (Eds.). (2015). The struggle for the long-term in transnational science and politics: forging the future. Routledge, New Perspectives in History.
Andersson, Jenny and Pauline Prat. 2015. "Gouverner le « long terme ». La prospective et la production bureaucratique des futurs en France." Gouvernement &action publique no. 3:9-29.
Andersson, Jenny and Anne Greet Keizer. 2014. "Governing the future: science, policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the Netherlands and Sweden." History and technology: an international journal 30 (1-2): 104-122.
Andersson, J. (2012). "The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World". The American Historical Review, vol. 117, no 5: 1411-1430.
Andersson, J. & Rindzeviciute, E. (2012) “The Political Life of Prediction: The Future as a Space of Scientific World Governance in the Cold War Era”. Les Cahiers européens de Sciences Po, no.4 : 1-25. Download PDF
Andersson, Jenny. "Choosing futures. Alva Myrdal and the construction of Swedish futures studies 1967-1972" International Review for Social History; vol. 51, p. 277-295.