Prescience Studies: Economic Forecasting and the Making of a Future in Greece

CHRISTINE SOO-YOUNG KIM, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, was awarded funding in April 2013 to aid research on 'Prescience Studies: Economic Forecasting and the Making of a Future in Greece,' supervised by Dr. Elizabeth Povinelli. This project asks how the future is constituted as an object of knowledge in the present, and it attempts to answer this question by examining one of the primary factors bringing this object into being in Greece today-namely, discourses and practices concerning the economy. The research consists of ethnographic and documentary methods focusing on the production, circulation, and use of economic knowledge as well as the routinization of modes of thought and activity regarding the economy in everyday life. Through a study of economic forecasting, social insurance, and investment practices in particular, the project considers how efforts to act upon the future enable ideas about what the economy is and how it works to take shape and become familiar. The research ultimately seeks to give an account of how discourses and practices concerning the economy gain hold as authoritative modes of thinking about and acting upon the future and, moreover, how the future operates as a crucial site for establishing and contesting claims to knowledge, legitimacy, and belonging in contemporary Greece.