Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the political condition of the present by analysing the imagination of the future. Based on an ethnography of the Portuguese education system, it explores the multiple spatio-temporalites that political anthropology must consider while reflecting upon the “current interregnum”.

Paper Abstract:

This paper reflects upon the political-economic conditions of the present by analysing how they impact the imagination of the future. My research is based on an ethnography developed in the Portuguese education system. In the Portuguese context, multiple crises converge in the collective experience of an uncanny present (Bryant, 2016), awakening and re-assembling multiple pasts and futures. We take educational policies as a privileged locus for investigating how different agents strive to answer this “current interregnum”. In 2017, the Portuguese Ministry of Education proposed a new political vision for the future based on the “Student’s profile by the end of compulsory education”. But this specific vision is challenged by the diverse perspectives of students, teachers, educational agents and communities, by their day-to-day efforts in producing futural orientations (Bryant & Knight, 2019) capable of overcoming a desolated present. These dialogues, but mostly the misunderstandings the ethnography encountered, create new understandings of citizenship, new spaces and times for agency, and new political identities and affinities. From hegemonic discourses to local practices, the negotiation between powers and agents produces an array of interrelated liminal spaces where each agent seeks to domesticate change. In these in-betweens, politics and the political are profoundly reconfigured. Considering all these processes, we inquire how the negotiation of a future through schooling produces new political responses, as hegemonic as emancipatory. This paper argues that a political anthropology of the present must consider the multiple spatio-temporalities that emerge, and are forged, in the contemporary relations between subjects and institutions.