Short Abstract

The workshop centers the growing feeling in our research sites that the futures societies are facing are dystopian. It aims to explore the potential of an anthropology of collapse that redirects future imaginaries and temporal horizons from renewal and progress to irreversible decline and loss.

Long Abstract

Our contemporary moment is characterized by increasing feelings of decline, breakdown and the loss of possibility and agency. While futures have long been understood as spaces where positive transformation and utopian possibilities were situated, now they are increasingly experienced in a more negative light as sites of fear, anxiety, anticipated grief and loss. Global dynamics such as climate crisis, the triumph of AI, pandemics, wars and the political shift to the right radically challenge the possibility of (good) futures. In our panel we want to approach these developments through the notion of collapse. We understand collapse not as "the end of the world" (Servigne and Stevens 2015, 2) but as a negative future orientation that challenges normative ideas of temporality and change, and gives way to new practices, affects and material constellations. We are interested in exploring the potential of an anthropology of collapse that redirects future imaginaries and temporal horizons from renewal and progress to irreversible decline and loss. Which forms of care, solidarity and collectivity might arise from that perspective? How are negative futures experienced, anticipated and prefigured? What can we learn from Indigenous peoples who have already been living through the collapse of their worlds?