Paper long abstract:

In 2008/09 an "Anomalous Wave", as the student protest called itself, flooded Italy; the events took place within an anomic period of widespread socio-political crisis, worsened by the financial breakdown of world markets. Weaved within the complex fabric and layers of crises, the lives of the students who partook in the movement risked their own 'presence' and meaning in the socio-political unmaking of their (educational, relational, occupational) expectations. From such a critical context, new imagined futures emerged, scattering possibilities and breaching the predictable with a wide 'space of possibility'. My contribution explores the hopes of Bologna University students, the practices they fostered, the worldviews that oriented them and the subjunctive and uchronic 'contaminations' that can affect the ethnographer and his theoretical skeletons in periods of crisis: a re-directioning of ethnographic knowledge, I suggest, that casts light on the connections between imagination, knowledge production and action in a context of crisis.