Paper Short Abstract:

Blang communities in the uplands of the China-Myanmar border, trace their origins to waves of people escaping catastrophes and conquest in the lowlands. An analysis of social organisation in these post-catastrophe societies, suggests that a new world can be born from the ashes of the old.

Paper Abstract:

In the Zomian uplands of the China-Myanmar border live several "minority ethnic groups" who trace their origins to maroons and migrants who escaped slavery, epidemics, war, and conquest to establish new societies on the margins of states. Among them are Mon-Khmer speaking communities who call themselves Blang. My presentation will analyse what Blang communities can teach us about post-catastrophe social organisation.

All Blang communities with oral or written histories maintain that they originally lived in lowland kingdoms, which they for varying reasons abandoned to escape into the mountains. Rather than (re)establishing their own kingdoms in the mountains, these communities are founded on the basis of consensus democracy. Each village is autonomous and social organisation differs somewhat from village to village, but they share some basic premises. Firstly, any issue that affects the entire village must be decided by the village general assembly (pom yung) which must reach consensus (pom bing). Without consensus there is no option but to keep deliberating. Secondly, specialists and office holders are selected by either committee, sortition, or primogeniture, but must ultimately be appointed by consensus of the village general assembly. Majority elections were only introduced by the Communist Party. In fact the biggest issue facing Blang communities is not climate change, but the state which since 1953 impinges on the village's self-governance.

The social organisation of Blang communities thus suggest that catastrophe is not necessarily a simply destructive process, but that the ends of the world can also represent the birth of new possibilities.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper critiques linear historical narratives, exploring the Soviet Union's collapse as the "end-times" through Azerbaijani women's memories. It examines nostalgia, trauma, and how colonial pasts shape future dynamics amid geopolitical tensions.

Paper Abstract:

This paper critically examines the nature of historical narratives, challenging the traditional conception of history as a linear trajectory toward either progress (triumph) or decline (catastrophe). Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida — who rejected linear temporal models, emphasizing discontinuity and the interpretive nature of history — this research investigates the collapse of the Soviet Union as a paradigmatic instance of “end-times”. Specifically, it focuses on the collective memory of the Soviet-to-post-Soviet transition in Azerbaijan, where a rupture in historical experience has given rise to post-Soviet nostalgia and, for some, trauma, despite the perceived liberation from 71 years of colonization. This ethnographic study is based on biographical interviews that I conducted in 2022 and 2024 with women from four cities in Azerbaijan, whose memories have not been previously documented. The research aims to deconstruct historical meta-narratives by exploring how cultural norms, political ideologies, and power structures shape the formation and suppression of specific narratives in Azerbaijan. Furthermore, it interrogates how the remembrance of the colonial past influences future political and social dynamics, particularly in the context of Azerbaijan's relationship with Russia, a key actor in the ongoing Karabakh conflict.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines how Mapuche interlocutors in urban Chile make sense of themselves, their surroundings, and the duty of keeping the world alive amid landscapes of collapsed temporalities, where settler colonial atrocities do not stay in the past but continue becoming part of the present.

Paper Abstract:

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the unconquered Mapuche people of the Southern Cone dispossessed of the vast majority of their territory. Driven to the city by settler colonial violence and deprivation over the course of the twentieth century, Mapuche interlocutors in Santiago de Chile continue living in awareness of calamities that began long before they were born and which they see extend into an indeterminate future. Their daily lives are carried out on landscapes of collapsed temporalities, as settler colonial atrocities do not stay in the past but continue reshaping themselves in the present; by taking new forms in the more-than-human environment, the settler colonial project remains always unfinished. This paper examines two of these junctions in Mapuche thinking about the past and its enduring consequences: the history of a haunted tree growing atop mass graves and buried treasure, and the perception of recent Latin American migrants vis-à-vis historical settlers. This further sheds light on how indigenous interlocutors make sense of themselves, their surroundings, the temporalities that bind everything together, and what it takes to persist in the ‘end-times’. Amid their own dire predictions, within a desertifying urban environment they have long found inhospitable, Mapuche persevere in doing what they know, or ‘the real business of human life’ (Graeber 2013: 223): the making of moral persons who will carry on the duty of keeping the world alive.

Paper Short Abstract:

On ecologically fragile Sagar Island in the Indian Sundarbans, thinking about catastrophes is shaped by both linear and cyclical time, linking displacement and upheavals to faith and continuity. An interplay of temporality and materiality helps understand diverse experiences of crises and agency.

Paper Abstract:

The deltaic region of the Southern Sundarbans in the Bay of Bengal is characterised by the recurrent mutation of riverine geographies and shifting island terrains. The impacts of the climate crisis aggravate the ecological fragility of the islands in the estuary. This paper studies Sagar Island, the largest inhabited island in the Indian Sundarbans, known for its revered Hindu pilgrimage site marking the confluence of the holy river Ganga and the Bay of Bengal. The everyday lived experiences of the islanders are shaped by their relative isolation from the mainland, vulnerability to rapid planetary changes and dwelling amidst the timelessness of the place of pilgrimage. Compiling archival findings with ethnographic fieldwork, the paper looks at the social implications of the transformation of inhabitants into ecological refugees by the twin processes of land erosion and tropical catastrophes. The paper shows that when thinking about catastrophes, two notions of time intersect and inform the islanders’ worldviews. The perception of catastrophes, embankment breaches, and land loss as a linear causal process prompts the relocation of refugees to colonies, which entails deep socio-economic and cultural dislocations that lead to new forms of precarity. However, the notion of cyclical time informed by religious worldviews counterbalances the linear progression of loss by providing an anchor of faith in continuity despite disruptions. The interplay of temporality and materiality allows for the understanding of diverse experiences of agency by examining the intersections of environmental crises, displacement, and the processes of place-making.

Paper Short Abstract:

It explains how pain has hunted in the Syrian refugees’ bodies and stole their future. This painful process starts with a pang that comes from the past and is embodied in a swallow of saliva. Death in exile turned the pang into pain as a choke-up.

Paper Abstract:

Exile is a space for revolutionary aspirations, whereas exile is also a space for punishment. It is a space where people feel in pain emotionally and physically. The body is the surface of the pain, and the emotional suffering is embodied in it in various forms.

This proposal explains how pain has hunted in the Syrian refugees’ bodies and stole their future. The data is collected from ethnographic work conducted over nine months in Germany and the UK.

This proposal draws from the hauntological approach to understand the temporal dimensions of the Syrian refugees. Hauntology refers to the failure of the future to materialise as imagined, repeating the past and extending the present.

I argue that the Syrian refugees' body is haunted by pain. The pain starts with a pang that comes from the past. Pang is embodied in the emotional swallow of saliva, a brief but intense moment of emotional pain. The death traced them to exile. Experiencing death in exile turned the pang into pain, which haunts their bodies and embodies constant choke-up, which leads to a melancholic present and temporal mourning, accepting the present as it is, and losing the future that they wanted.

Paper Short Abstract:

What ends with the end of privatised healthcare? This paper explores how a privatised healthcare system unraveled in the wake of Lebanon’s 2019 liquidity crisis, during a period of time described by many as ‘al-inhiyar’—the collapse of Lebanon’s economy.

Paper Abstract:

What ends with the end of privatised healthcare? Lebanon’s 2019 liquidity crisis has been described among the worst economic crises of the past 150 years. In its wake, a healthcare system that had long-relied on privatised care as its main mode of public health governance unraveled. Drawing from fieldwork in 2021-2022, this paper will explore this period of time invariably described as that of “the collapse” (al-inhiyar), a period of time when prices, social relations, identities and structures become unmoored and in flux. Collapse, as approached here, is presented not as an end, but as a re-organisation. Among microbiologists, nurses, pharmacists, medication distributors, and physicians, the paper describes how collapse is not only something that happens to people, but also something that people themselves do. It also appears to take place not only at the level of a national economy, but also at the register of agentive changes in routinised everyday behaviour: in its enactments. Rather than imbue collapse with radical or revolutionary potential, this paper will frame its potential as one of ‘widening’ the spaces of struggle around privatised healthcare, where an ontological struggle — "a struggle over the making and unmaking of the social world” (Hage 2015) — takes place. Contra authoritative forms of medicine, this ‘widening’ takes place in recapturings of healthcare by non-physicians, opening up questions related to what Ivan Illich (1973) had called “conviviality”— collective responses that aim to “do ever more with ever less.”

Paper Short Abstract:

On trial for blasphemy against the messianic futures of Greater Russian, Moscow-based futurists and atheists hypothesize about a world without humans and speculative scenarios of extinctions. What stands behind their destructive vision?

Paper Abstract:

Catastrophe, post-apocalypse and total annihilation of humankind are envisaged and shared online by a network of Moscow-based futurists and atheists. They imagine futures without humans, and worlds destroyed after a drunken night out with aliens. Do these end of time scenarios constitute a critique of the contemporary socio-political brutality? A rejection of history and its human-centric narratives? Or enunciation of future-pessimism? What is the value of speculative extinction, in the realities of the ongoing war and a prophesied future of Russia's greatness, war crimes against and killings of people in Ukraine, and return of zinc coffins into Russia's indigenous communities and indigent rural areas?

Paper Short Abstract:

(White) discourse in the West centered around “catastrophic thinking” functions as an extension of settler colonialism and genocide denial. “German guilt” (over the Holocaust) is being weaponized to deny the ongoing genocide in Gaza by erasing the Nakba and exceptionalizing Antisemitism.

Paper Abstract:

Germany is home to the largest number of Palestinians living in Europe who have been resisting aggressive silencing, censorship, surveillance, violent arrests, raids and deportations for decades. In extension to the “war on terror”, German public discourse and governmental policy propels what Anna-Esther Younes terms “war on Antisemitism” (2020). It is a discursive framework, part of “new Antisemitism”, which conflates Antisemitism with critique of Israel (e.g. IHRA definition), hollowing out the meaning of the term as such. This results in even Jewish activists, scholars, and artists to be accused of Antisemitism, in itself a case of, exposing the underlying moral corruption and white panic. Major target of the “war on Antisemitism” are the Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and migrants living in Germany today, criminalized by both politicians and the media to “be bringing” Antisemitism to Germany (i.e. “imported Antisemitism”). This is in itself a dangerous erasure of the Holocaust, the Nakba, and German colonialism, three catastrophes being denied, to absolve (white) Germans of any guilt and complicity thereof. The genocide denial and the violent crackdown of the Palestine solidarity movement have been happening under a thriving climate movement and (white) feminist green-leftist foreign policy. To de-center white and neoliberal discourse on “catastrophic thinking”, I highlight Kara Keeling’s (2019) powerful analysis of Afrofuturism, focusing on settler colonialism and the Middle Passage: Sun Ra’s lyrics echoes “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”.