Sensory futures ethnography: sensing at the edge of the future

In this chapter, I outline and demonstrate sensory futures ethnography. What does the future feel like? How can sensory futures ethnography help us to constitute trusted futures in a world of climate change and automated systems and technologies? Ethnographic practice has conventionally remained ethically and theoretically focused on the present, as it slips over into the past. Now, I call for opening up ethnographic practice to the anticipatory modes through which we sense and experience immediate near and far futures. This means expanding theoretical and conceptual frameworks beyond the study of the senses and futures toward the experiential and anticipatory. It requires new experimental ethnographies capable of invoking futures in collaboration with participants, modes of being in simulated futures, and interdisciplinary ethnographic teamwork. I explore these questions with reference to two documentary filmmaking events, focused on air technology futures.