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After Progress, the latest Sociological Review Monograph, examines what it might take for us to learn to think and live after progress, “arguably the defining idea of modernity”, and one that the Monograph’s editors suggest that “we cannot live with but do not know how to live without”.

Published digitally today, with a print version forthcoming, the new monograph is Issue 70:2 in The Sociological Review Journal series. A broad-ranging collection of new scholarly writing helmed by guest editors Dr Martin Savransky (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Dr Craig Lundy (London Metropolitan University), its 12 chapters feature the insights of a global, cross-disciplinary cohort of 14 academics including sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, and science and technology scholars.

In the introduction to After Progress, the editors examine the notion of progress and how it is framed by “civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be ‘better’ than the present”, and observe that progress’ “promises and discontents still command global political imaginations, values, and policies to this day”. The contributions in this collection, they note, aim to reframe progress “not as one modern value among others but as the very mode of evaluation from which modern values are derived”.

Dr Savransky and Dr Lundy recently launched a website, also titled After Progress, that presents work associated with the project that informed the monograph. The website is home to the After Progress Digital Exhibition, which its creators note is the “result of a multiplicity of collective efforts to weave together collaborative and multimedia forms of storytelling that might help us envisage ways of living and dying well outside of the modern coordinates of progress, drawing inspiration from the After Progress symposium series held in 2019.”

The After Progress monograph will have its official launch on 8 July 2022 as part of the London Conference of Critical Thought 2022, which will be held over two days at Birkbeck, University of London.

After Progress table of contents

• “After Progress: Experiments in the Revaluation of Values”, Martin Savransky and Craig Lundy
• “Knowledge, Progress, and the Knowledge of Progress”, Sanjay Seth
• “Governing Progress: from Cybernetic Homeostasis to Simondon’s Politics of Metastability”, Andrea Bardin and Marco Ferrari
• “Toward a Complex Conception of Progress”, Craig Lundy
• “Epidemiological Plots and the National Syndrome”, Lara Choksey
• “Waiting for Tindaya: Modern Ruins and Indigenous Futures in Fuerteventura”, Isaac Marrero-Guillamón
• “Tilting Relationalities: Exploring the World through Possible Futures of Agriculture”, Henrietta L. Moore and Juan Manuel Moreno
• “Implicated by Scale: Anthropochemicals and the Experience of Ecology”, Dimitris Papadopoulos
• “Re-animalising Wellbeing: Multispecies Justice After Development”, Krithika Srinivasan
• “Ecological Uncivilisation: Precarious World-Making After Progress”, Martin Savransky
• “Rifted Subjects, Fractured Earth: Progress as Learning to Live on a Self-Transforming Planet”, Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski
• “An Ecology of Trust: Consenting to a Pluralist Universe”, Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers