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Paper short abstract

The presentation discusses how the engagement with ideas and experiences of futures proposed by Brazilian Indigenous people can impact anthropological doing and its potentialities for promoting a plural commitment to the time to come.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, Brazilian Indigenous people gained global visibility by offering alternative possibilities for the future in a world merged in a time of polycrises, crossing various arenas, including debates on climate change, new technologies and multicultural societies. Despite their diversity, these Indigenous proposals share a reframing of hegemonic unilinear temporalities toward an “ancestral future” which claims for the connection of past, present and future. Based on ongoing collaborations with Indigenous people, the presentation reflects on the potentialities and challenges raised by these proposals for ethnographic experiences and educational practices. It interrogates how the commitment to such proposals of futures redefines a shared temporal experience in the field and in writing, how it reshapes the positionalities of the subject involved in the ethnographic doing, and how it affects the possibilities of realisation of collaborative experiences. It also reflects on how the inclusion of Indigenous futures not only as objects of investigation, but as proper political and epistemological tools stimulate the emergence of creative suggestions for redefining expectations, foresights, and fears in the teaching and learning of anthropology in academia. The presentation closely analyses if and how Indigenous proposals of futures can promote the emergence of innovative suggestions beyond polarised utopias and dystopias. The thesis is that the creation of a symmetric dialogue between multiple proposals of futures, anthropological and Indigenous, in ethnography and in the classroom, can incentivise a critical reflection on the collective responsibility for a shared future that is respectful of plural lives and experiences.

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Paper short abstract

This paper discusses visions of environmental futures and unexpected human, technological and multispecies alliances in the San Francisco Bay Area. While imagining the future is often seen as daunting amid inequality and climate risks, we show polarizations and commonalities in these scenarios.

Paper long abstract

The San Francisco Bay Area is often viewed as the cradle of two opposing futures: influential tech industry visions, on the one hand, and movements and scholars advancing social and environmental justice, on the other. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 with highly diverse research participants, this paper shows that these discourses resonate to some extent with everyday practices of futuring but also strongly deviate. In a context marked by high inequality and climate change-related risks, such as wildfires and rising sea levels, thinking about the long-term future is often seen as challenging, irrelevant, or problematic; yet people still devise scenarios.

First, from a methodological point of view, we will discuss discrepancies in futuring based on research with individuals with starkly different resources and futuring practices, involving different objects, contexts, generational, and more-than-human thinking. Second, we present scenarios that emerged from interviews despite initial scepticism concerning futuring. These environmental scenarios are often socially polarized, with strong utopian or dystopian tendencies (tech oligarchy vs. grassroots democracy, humans vs. nature, rich vs. poor, etc.); depending on the subject and scale, but they also reveal unexpected commonalities regarding anticipated fault lines and shared concerns. Understanding polarization through the lens of anticipation allows us not only to grasp possible outlooks but also to explore the commonalities and possibilities of unexpected human, technological, and multispecies alliances, which are considered key to how futures come into being.

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Paper short abstract

In a French mid-mountain setting dominated by carnormativity, a group of residents promote innovative forms of active mobility. This presentation aims to document the origin and development of this initiative to question how alternative futures of mobility can be created in car dominated rural area.

Paper long abstract

In a French mid-mountain setting dominated by carnormativity, a group of residents founded in 2018 an association to promote innovative forms of active mobility. They defined the criteria for a vehicle that could remain competitive with cars in terms of journey time, protection from the weather and capacity. They developed a partnership with a regional manufacturer to jointly create a prototype that met these requirements. Thanks to public funding, the association has been running a program to test these vehicles.

Unlike industrial cars, these low-tech vehicles can be built, maintained, and repaired by their users. They involve a different approach to thermal and physical comfort. Furthermore, due to their limited energy autonomy and their poor compatibility with most of the electric charging stations, users often ask to recharge at private homes, establishing new bonds of mutual aid. This new technical object is thus giving rise to new aspirations and social relationships, as well as new skills and physical techniques.

Based on ethnographic research combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews conducted with various stakeholders in the field of territory and mobility. This presentation aims to document the conditions under which this initiative emerged, its development to date and to question how alternative mobility futures can emerge in a car dominated society.

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Paper short abstract

Children imagined hopeful post-pandemic futures. Their visions highlight agency, intergenerational responsibility, and creative, non polarized ways of thinking about future crises and shared social worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on research conducted with children during and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. Younger children (aged 5–6), with use of art, craft, and narrative, imagined the post-pandemic world. Older children, aged 6–11, participated in art-based and participatory workshops that resulted, among other, in recommendations for adults in the event of future crises. Imagining the future produces knowledge about understandings of the present. At the same time, its practical dimension cannot be overlooked: it generates solutions that illuminate what kinds of worlds are thinkable.

Although the study concerned the future in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the crisis itself was not the central focus for the participants. The envisioned future was a good and safe world, one in which free action would be possible. The children also emphasized obligations and responsibilities toward a good future. The recommendations created by children for future crises may be interpreted literally, as a set of principles that could inform policy making and practical interventions. However, they may also be understood as an invitation to co-create a shared, better world.

The research proved that engaging children in constructing visions of the future makes it possible to obtain nuanced responses that diverge from polarized dystopian or utopian critiques of society. Their contributions demonstrate that creative approaches to the future are not only possible but necessary, and children can be viewed not only as the future of the societies, but predominantly as creative future makers.

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Paper short abstract

Based on an anthropological study in organisations I will examine how organisational culture shapes employees’ everyday mobility practices and how co-created interventions could contribute to plural mobility futures beyond polarised narratives of sustainability.

Paper long abstract

Contemporary debates on sustainable mobility are increasingly shaped by polarised imaginaries, ranging from technological optimism versus societal collapse and individual responsibility versus structural constraint to the antagonistic framing of car drivers versus cyclists. These oppositions often render mobility futures as either inevitable or unattainable, limiting the space for meaningful intervention.

Drawing on an ongoing doctoral research project, I will present findings from an anthropological study conducted in organisations in Tartu, Estonia. Using participant observation, in-depth interviews, and co-creational approach, the research examines how sustainability is perceived and embedded in daily life and how contextual factors (organisational culture, leadership practices, work arrangements, social relationships, but also work conditions and infrastructure) shape employees’ mobility practices. I approach mobility as culturally embedded and socially negotiated practice.

I will further reflect on co-creation workshops carried out with employees, in which mobility-related interventions are collaboratively designed. The workshops create a space for employees to actively shape and commit to interventions they are willing to try out, while enabling to explore what participants consider feasible, negotiable, and worth experimenting with. These workshops function as interventional sites that seek to unsettle polarised mobility imaginaries – such as car dependence versus diversified mobility practices – by foregrounding situated practices, collective negotiation, and context-sensitive possibilities.

Small-scale, relational, and experimental interventions can reconfigure polarised futures from within, offering alternatives to dominant sustainability narratives. By situating interventions within everyday organisational life, I argue that anthropology can move beyond critique and understanding alone and take an active role in shaping mobility futures.

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Paper short abstract

How do anticipated futures become capable of organising action? Drawing conversations on Earth Observation and environmental governance, this paper argues that operationality emerges through successive reconfigurations that transform observations into models, dashboards, and interventions.

Paper long abstract

Anthropologists have long argued that futures are imagined, anticipated, and contested before they materialise. This paper asks a different question: How do anticipated futures acquire the capacity to organise action in the present? Rather than treating operationalisation as a discrete moment, I approach it as an emergent process through which observations are repeatedly reconfigured as they move across scientific, technical, institutional, and political contexts.

Drawing on ethnographic engagement with satellite-based Earth Observation and an Austrian research project assessing the carbon sequestration potential of private gardens, the paper follows how planetary observations are successively reformatted into indicators, models, GIS analyses, dashboards, and situated environmental interventions. Rather than understanding these transformations simply as mediation or representation, I conceptualise them as successive reconfigurations through which observations gradually become operational—that is, capable of organising decisions long before the futures they anticipate have materialised.

This perspective shifts analytical attention away from future imaginaries themselves towards the infrastructures and practices through which anticipated futures acquire institutional force. Operationality, I argue, is not an inherent property of satellite imagery, models, or dashboards. It emerges through a cumulative sequence of reconfigurations that stabilise observations across different practical settings while simultaneously redistributing authority over which futures become actionable.

The paper therefore proposes an anthropology of operationalisation that complements existing work on anticipation by examining how possible futures become progressively capable of governing action in the present.