Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, the paper seeks to problematise agency in its relations to affective and temporal dimensions of anticipation. It explores the lingering effects of economic crisis and its impact on the present social understandings and actions.

Paper Abstract:

The intervention offers ethnographic exploration of how the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into crisis with unintended consequences. It unpacks the complex relationships of the past and the anticipatory modes of the (continuous) present, which alert to looming crisis future in most surprising ways. From economic and political turbulences to more mundane matters and materialities of the everyday life, there are vernacular timescapes that emerge, repeat and make the Icelandic present uncanny. They produce crisis future that haunts and is haunted; the crisis future that envelops, presses and ripples through the social atmosphere, pushing people to think thoughts and do things, including the creation of otherwise unthinkable alignments, that had once been difficult to imagine. The paper thus offers both, empirical and theoretical insights into anticipation as a form of agency; it highlights the affective ways of future-making and unpacks the practices of time-tricking. Focusing on contingencies of these processes sheds light on continuous ways of doing and undoing the world.