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- Convenors:
-
Aet Annist
(University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Michaela Haug (University of Cologne)
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- Stream:
- Extinction
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We invite contributions with theoretical, empirical and/or methodological focus to realities emerging from the expectation of catastrophic futures, and the creative and systematic ways in which people study, guide, abandon or embrace the expectation of profound, catastrophic change.
Long Abstract:
This panel proposes to consider anthropologically the understanding and meaning of and responses to the expectation of catastrophic futures. Such future imaginings can trigger powerful affect and may demand action, directing both individual and social responses. The panel brings together research on how catastrophic futures create new identities, socialities, movements; how these channel the imagination into action - to prevent, to mitigate, to prepare and prefigure - and with what results.
Further, we would pay attention to how does this new, alternative future world that is being thought up correspond to the imaginings of catastrophes and collapse. How do fear and hope, renewal and disintegration exist side by side in the lives of individuals and movements? What are the social, cultural, creative and systematic ways in which people study, guide, abandon or embrace the expectation of profound change in the world where nothing is guaranteed? We welcome ethnographic and theoretical insights into what frames and guides futures, and how do different focuses on future - climate change, pandemics, resource exhaustion, extintions, civilisational crises - formulate different present outcomes.
We also invite methodological scrutiny of studying the future: where is the ethnographer when the people with whom they study struggle with their visions of terrible futures? What is the "curious practice" that "staying with the trouble" (Haraway 2016) could mean for the fieldworker, especially the one who has "gone native" with activism and/or subscribes to the same concerns; what possibilities - ontological, epistemological - does this hold open?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Hacer Gören (Koç University) Sebnem Koser Akcapar (Social Sciences University of Ankara)
Paper short abstract:
Based on two bodies of literature, we revolve around the question of whether yet-to-come climate/environment-induced migrants are responsible, resilient subjects or disempowered, racialized victims. We trace the ways these two divergent imaginaries translate into action at a macro scale.
Paper long abstract:
The cascades of events within the 'thick present', including the climate crisis, have led us to rethink thick temporalities which more and more animate the synchronous flow of the present and the future. One of the starkest implications of this has been on the signification and constitution of the image of climate/environment-induced migrants. By comparing two relatively recent bodies of literature, this paper intends to trace the materiality of two different frames concerning climate/environment-induced migrants. One is 'migration as an adaptation strategy to climate change' (Bettini 2013; 2017) and the other is 'racialization tendencies of apocalyptic narratives' (Baldwin 2012; 2016). By decentralizing and individualizing risks and responsibilities behind climate change, the first perspective depicts migrants as adaptive, resilient, and response-able agents, who can make decisions, take responsibility, and migrate so as to adapt to the climate crisis. The latter, though, constitute climate/environment-induced migrants as disempowered, securitized, dehumanized, and quantified bodies stripped of any decision-making, context, history, socio-ecological conditions, and involvement in democratic political processes. With an emphasis on discourse as 'worlding worlds' (Haraway 2016), we revolve around the question of whether yet-to-come climate/environment-induced migrants are responsible subjects or racialized victims. We also ask the question of whether such binaries contribute to more responsive, responsible, and sympoietic worlds in the face of the climate crisis or reversely, normalize the current crisis and reproduce more indifference to it. It is the question of how such imaginaries translate into action at a macro scale.
Daina Pupkevičiūtė (University of Tartu)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I will address how emotional entanglement can be the driving force for activism and engagement within and outside the academia. I will also talk about how it complicates the task of the researcher by multiplying the roles they have to juggle and raising the issue of divided loyalties.
Paper long abstract:
"I fell in love with the place" must be the only phrase I recall verbatim since my fieldwork in an occupied forest in 2018. It was pronounced by one of my field collaborators, climate activists. I, in my turn, fell in love with that place too, and in my mind I turn to it even now, which confirms the forewarning of yet another of my research collaborators - that of the risks to never really be able leave the forest.
In this paper I will address how emotional entanglement can be the driving force for activism and engagement within and outside the academia. I will also seek to talk about how it complicates the task of a researcher already juggling multiple roles which they have to take up, along with various risks they encounter when trying to manage the issue of divided loyalties.
I will further invite to discuss, based on my previous fieldwork and amidst the preparations for the future one, what (methodological) frameworks, if any at all, might be useful in "staying with the trouble," as well as how and if entanglement can be of use to the ethnographer "gone native".
Aet Annist (University of Tartu and Tallinn University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to study the transformative and pre-figurative discourses and practices of climate movement, preparing for a different world amidst COVID crisis. These layers of changes and the movement's own theory of change are considered with critical tools from anthropology of development.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will start from the empirical material on creativity and systematicity of transformative and pre-figurative discourses and practices within Extinction Rebellion before and during the COVID crisis. Aiming not only to accept but also to drive profound change due to climate catastrophe, the activists seek ways to apply their ideals for the changed world already in the present, creating future-reaching systems and guidelines for the wider movement.
However, in the course of such efforts, another, unexpected, catastrophe has affected the prospects of and perspectives on change for individuals as well as the movement. These bring along different frames within which to enable and enact the change, and create new challenges as activists, placed amidst intense change, are planning for the next changes they expect to be even more intense.
New rituals to denote commitment to profoundly transformed relations between people, environment and future are triggered in these circumstances. I will aim to analyse these challenges and changes with an eye on the resulting exclusions and inclusions, relations of trust and experiences of conflict. As this research is still in early stages, new trends and theories may emerge in the course of the next months, however, I aim to understand whether the movement's own theory of change and future oriented practices could be analysed with the critical tools from anthropology of development.