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- Convenors:
-
Sonja Moghaddari
(University of Bern)
Karl Swinehart (University of Louisville)
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- Discussant:
-
David Zeitlyn
(Oxford)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Social processes take place across varied temporal frameworks, timings and paces. Future orientated action is often challenged by human and non-human actors who follow competing temporal logics. This panel explores the confrontation of different futures under conditions of constraint and coercion.
Long Abstract:
From financial instruments, to medical diagnosis, from climate prognoses, to professional aspirations, the future is part and parcel of what constitutes the social in all its utopic, dystopic, but also banal, and quotidian forms. Social processes take place across varied temporal frameworks, timings and paces. Event temporalities often confront (the eventuality of) constraints and contingencies caused by human and non-human powers such as institutional or social authorities, natural forces, non-humans, and algorithms, who follow different, competing timings and temporal frameworks: a locust invasion may arrive just before the harvest, a person may fall terminally ill just after the birth of their first child.
This panel examines what happens when different futures confront each other under conditions of constraint and coercion. Building on work on (the impossibility of) anticipation, prediction, speculation, time tricking, and the interaction of pasts, presents and futures, what kind of social dynamics emerge in the face of power inequalities related to conflicting future projects? We welcome contributions that help us ethnographically conceptualize constraints on future oriented action. We aim to engage across subdisciplines in order to contribute to the anthropological theory of the future and prediction.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper examines emic understandings and enactments of l'aventure (adventure) among West African labour migrants in urban Ghana to shed light on how temporalities of imagination intersect with migratory trajectories in conditions of socioeconomic precarity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper expands on the emic category of l'aventure (adventure) to examine how temporalities of imagination intersect with the life trajectories of a group of West African labour migrants in urban Ghana. Designating a perilous path of social becoming by way of individual outward movement, the migrants' enactments of l'aventure relate to an imaginary practice that casts uncertainty as a resource to be explored, endured and exploited for aspirational self-making. Driven by expectations about possible future outcomes of their journeys, these imaginaries, far from being idealised fantasies, are drawn on as a measure for evaluating present experiences, actions and hardships. Folding together the actual and possible of migratory mobility in conditions of socioeconomic precarity, the imaginative affordances of l'aventure shape feelings of frustration with a perceived lack of personal progress, and they support the moral capacity to persevere in spite of economic predicaments, often for many years on end. The focus on the temporal horizons opened up through imaginative practice, I suggest, highlights the importance of moral positions and affective dispositions for understanding negotiations of migratory success and failure. Conversely, attention to how migrants position themselves at the juncture of imagined futures and strictures of the present offers a nuanced reflection on the anthropological implications of the link between experience, imagination and time.
Paper short abstract:
Future and terminal patients might not appear to align with each other, yet, maybe quite the contrary. In this paper I trace how different temporalities -that of the cell, scientists, doctors, patients and the nation state- articulate the development of new biomedical technology in China.
Paper long abstract:
"I travelled to China to buy life, a week, a couple of months, or maybe some years…" is a recurrent sentence used by Tina, a Spanish cancer patient, when talking about the CAR T-Cell therapy that she underwent in China. For Tina, as for many other cancer patients, time and life become synonyms that articulate their journey into the unknown: an experimental treatment in a foreign land with the objective to overcome their otherwise terminal condition. Yet, this quest for life, for a future, becomes entangled with other telos and temporalities.
Immunotherapy, especially Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell (CAR T) therapy, has become the fifth pillar of cancer. This therapy consists in a personalized living drug that enhances the patient's own immune system. China, immersed in its transition to a knowledge economy and focusing in biopharma and translational science as key sectors of development, is strongly betting on this treatment, already hosting the largest number of clinical trials in the world.
Understanding pharmaceuticals, or in this case biopharmaceuticals, as "made and remade […] fluid, ever evolving in relation to their context" (Hardon and Sanabria 2017), I have ethnographically traced the development of CAR T-cell therapy from the laboratory to patients. I conducted 12 months of fieldwork among lab technicians, scientists, doctors, cancer patients and their families in Shenzhen and Beijing. In this paper, I focus on how different telos and temporalities -of the cell, mice, lab technicians, scientists, patients, doctors and the nationstate- articulate the development of new biomedical technologies.
Paper short abstract:
Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Wisconsin, USA, this paper examines the confines of reimbursement experienced by millions of American student loan debtors, including the gap between graduates' aspirations and reality.
Paper long abstract:
As graduates burdened by student loan debt know, the future they imagined while still being students it is a future that is not always likely to come to fruition as it has for previous generations. This paper investigates an aspect of the so-called American debtocracy by scrutinizing the student loan system in the USA (Di Muzio and Robbins 2015).
As student loan debt is difficult to avoid and rarely forgiven, many Americans are sentenced to decades of living within the confines of reimbursement (Lazzarato 2017). The experience of paying back one's debt is not only shaped by the size of the loan but also by socio-economic background, race, and gender (Krabbe 2020, Zaloom 2019, Goldrick-Rab 2016).
Ethnographically, then, student loan debt presents the possibility to think about the fluidity and dynamism of time (past, present, and future) and to consider how in time and through time, the gap between debtors' aspirations and reality may widen. This gap challenges the inherent assumption of the American Dream, specifically the potential to climb the ladder of social mobility through education and credentials.
Based on fieldwork in Wisconsin, the paper attempts to unravel institutional logics of credit obtainment, debt repayment, and educational attainment, and how these constrain and enable various courses of action shaping the everyday lives of 45 million debtors. Thus this paper aligns itself with two intersecting bodies of literature, namely, credit and debt (Thorup 2016; James 2014; Peebles 2010), and anthropology of time (Bryant and Knight 2019; Ringel 2016; Bear 2014).
Paper short abstract:
Two futureoriented 'timescapes' encounter eachother in the field of the farmers: The technoscientific futurity of Climate Smart Agriculture associated with progress, and the timescape of entropy, calling for limitation. The response is paradoxical.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at ambiguities of industrial farming in a temporal perspective. Large industrial farmers in Saskatchewan speak of their passion for farming, their emotions involved with the cycles of growing and becoming, the thrill of driving mighty machines, the gamble of being caught up in the whirlwind ferocity of the staples economy. However recently their vision of progress as a linear increase in speed, size and quantity, of producing more with faster machines on bigger fields, has being challenged by the spectres of climate change, soil depletion and intoxication. The 'anticipatory' affective state of technoscientific futurity confronts the climate change paradigm in the field of the farmer disenchanting the future to the point of despair. The response is paradoxical: religious belief in science, hope for salvation, business as usual, anger towards those with a different vision of the future. Two futureoriented 'timescapes' encounter eachother in the field of the farmers. The technoscientific futurity of Climate Smart Agriculture that associates the future with progress, disagrees with the timescape of entropy, the diffusion of fossil energy that leads to heating up the Earth atmosphere and calls for limitation. The socio-affective engine of innovation-driven 'expectation' still drives the farming practices of most farmers, while the entropy paradigm is less sexy — a broken trust in promissory science. However it could lead farmers back in touch with the warmth of things, to the metabolic cycles of being, becoming and dying and to a reconnection with the intricate web of life of the soil.