Short Abstract

Climate futures gather force before they arrive. The workshop follows how they take hold in present life and asks what ethnography can learn while their consequences remain unsettled.

Long Abstract

Long before drought is declared or floodwater reaches a doorstep, people may inhabit a future that has not yet arrived. A familiar neighbourhood appears on a risk map, and a resilience plan begins to change what can count as a viable place to remain. Climate futures gather force before their consequences are known.

Anthropologists have traced disputes over environmental knowledge and the futures they make imaginable. Recent work turns to ecological change that outruns baselines and to resilience as it travels between policy and everyday life. Petryna uses horizon work to describe efforts to keep such change within reach of knowledge and action. This leaves an ethnographic question open: how does an uncertain future become consequential without becoming settled?

This is where "What Moves Us?" becomes tangible. Anticipation can enter attachment to a place and alter the materials through which its future is secured. It may revive older experiences that official urgency had treated as past. A decolonial approach asks not simply whose knowledge counts, but who can authorise what comes next and whose histories a new future carries forward.

We invite papers that follow projected futures as their hold on present life changes. They may emerge around an abrupt event or become perceptible through recurrence and attrition. The workshop asks what ethnography can learn by accompanying these futures before they harden into policy outcomes or crisis narratives. How do people come to inhabit the not-yet, and when does it cease to organise what seems possible?