Processes of future-making have increasingly become a distinct object of sociological research. This distinctness, however, often translates into an abstraction of ‘futures’ as epistemic constructs or meanings from their embedding social relations. This creates difficulties in analyzing how projections of the future are coordinated with the iterational and relational dimensions of social practice, and how imagined future(s) and social structure(s) interact in processes of future-making.
To help bridge this gap, I develop a conceptual vocabulary and framework for analysing how semantic futures are pragmatically embedded within relationally organized social contexts. Building on insights from research on enacted sense-making and cognition, I propose to (re-)conceptualize futures as synthetic representations articulated through distributed networks of pragmatic meaning(s). Future-making can then be analysed as a social semiotic process of defining and maintaining a distributed structure of indexical meanings whose relational ordering imposes a social, narrative grammar on the process of sense-making.