Futuring global change in science museums and centers : a role for anticipatory practices and imaginative acts

One defining quality of our current moment in the world is the disposition to thinking and living in anticipation of the future. Some would argue that we appear to be increasingly living in a 'regime of anticipation' (Mackenzie 2013) in which likelihoods and probabilistic outcomes prevail. This intensification of modes of knowing the emerging worlds that the future brings about is marking a particular mode of anticipation, one that urges social actors - and the biophysical sciences above all - to get hold of the as-yet-not. For the purposes of this chapter, this appraisal of the 'not yet' is traversed by a fundamental, game-changing question: that is, as Robib et al. ask, ' how can we live in a world where there is no nature without people?' (Robin et al. 2013, xv). The underlying significance of this matter is that what we do next has fateful consequences for human and nonhuman life on Earth. No longer do we have the option to step out of civilization with the recourse of coming back to it at a later time once the crisis is over.