Short Abstract

This panel examines what it means to live at the "end of worlds," exploring how people experience, resist, and reimagine collapsing ecological, social, political, and cultural worlds. It investigates practices of worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding, and the tensions and possibilities they reveal.

Long Abstract

Around the globe, people are living at the "end of worlds". A sense of collapsing or already collapsed worlds seems to be permeating ecological, cultural, political, religious, and economic lives. But, what kinds of worlds are ending, and for whom? How do people experience the ending of worlds? And, what possibilities or resistances do ‘end-times’ reveal or foreclose? This panel explores the existential, social, and political questions that surface with worlds ending; and what contemporary anthropology can say about living in their midsts. We invite contributions to investigate practices of worlding, un-worlding and re-worlding that take place ahead of, during, and after endings and their concomitant beginnings. The panel’s aim is to bring together anthropologies that grapple with these multiple, overlapping, and contradictory endings and the creative tensions that they generate: as collapse (economic, social, political, ecological, planetary), as cosmology, as corporeality, as more-than-human, as everyday practice, as (re)creation, as hope. Our aim is to seek adjacencies in the different ways of experiencing, understanding, and grappling with these endings, from the personal to the all-encompassing, the finite to the perpetual, the monstrous to the mundane, the metaphysical to the microscopic. Across these scales, the panel will tease out the tensions and creativities in anthropological approaches to worlding, un-worlding, and re-worlding; to what is lost, what is salvaged, what is created, and lives lived in the end-times.

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