End : 11 May 2026 à 16:15
Presentation of the seminar
LATTS is pleased to invite you to the next session of its general seminar, which will take place on Monday 11 May 2026 at 2pm. The session will focus on the book Discounting the Future: The Ascendancy of a Political Technology, published by Zone Books in 2024.
Liliana Doganova will present her book, followed by a discussion led by Emmanuelle Santoire, before opening the floor to questions from the audience.
This session will take place in Room B015 (Bienvenüe Building, Champs-sur-Marne) and will be broadcast via videoconference.
Join the Zoom meeting: https://univ-eiffel.zoom.us/j/84280301187
Meeting ID: 842 8030 1187
Passcode: LATTS2026
Summary of the book
Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova’s book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent.
Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain.
Liliana Doganova is a researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris, Université Paris Sciences & Lettres. At the crossroads of economic sociology and the sociology of science and technology, her work has focused on business models, the valorization of public research and the markets for bio- and eco-technologies.
Discounting the Future. The Ascendancy of a Political Technology