Phil Graham: critical insights into the futurity of discourse and the discourse of futurity

ABSTRACT

This essay examines Professor Phil Graham's contributions to the critical study of “futurology,” that is, the creation and use of projections of the future by elite social actors and institutions. Professor Graham was one of the first to examine the linguistic constitution and ideological implications of futurological projections within neoliberal discourses. I review this work and situate it within the broader field of Critical Futures Studies (CFS), a line of inquiry which seeks to interrogate and challenge dominant projections of the future. Specifically, I outline key concerns raised by both CFS and Graham concerning the impact technocratic practices and discourses of neoliberalism have on conceptions of the future. I then review the analytic approach underlying Graham's work, as well as specific contributions and insights his analyses offer critical futures scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Futurity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2024.2302781)

Notes

1 A portion of this research was published in Dunmire (1997).

2 I discuss the analysis presented in Graham (2001a), along with that from Graham (2002), in more detail below.

3 I discuss Graham’s sociolinguistic analysis in more detail below

4 Graham (2000) referenced Iedema’s manuscript when it was in production and, thus, ‘forthcoming.’ It was published in 2003 as: Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication, 2 (1), 29–57.

5 I can’t possibly do justice to Graham’s nuanced, technical explication and analysis in this overview of his work and encourage readers to engage with it directly.

6 First identified in McKenna and Graham (2000), process metaphor refers to changes to the grammatical function of verbs. It is similar to grammatical metaphor, which concerns changes to the grammatical function of any word or group of words, but restricts the change to processes.

7 This article was subsequently republished as Graham and Canny (2004) in Inayatullah’s edited volume The Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) Reader : Theory and Case Studies of an Integrative and Transformative Methodology.

8 See, for example, Aiezza (2015), Bennett (2019), Bondi (2016), de Saint-Georges (2013), Duncan (2014), Hannell (2018), Jancenelle et al. (2019), Jaworski et al. (2003), Jaworski and Fitzgerald (2008), Lazuka (2006), McKeown (2018), and Yu and Bondi (2019).

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Notes on contributors

Patricia Dunmire

Patricia Dunmire is Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Kent State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in argumentation, propaganda, and discourse studies. Her research has been published in several journals, including Discourse & Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and the Journal of Language and Politics, as well as in several edited volumes. She is author of The Great Nation of Futurity: The Discourse and Temporality of American National Identity (2023, Oxford) and Projecting the Future Through Political Discourse: The Case of the Bush Doctrine (2011, Benjamins).