Paper short abstract

In this paper, rather than treating crisis talk, emergency talk, and urgency talk as mere descriptive terms of exceptional events, I conceptualize them as governance practices that actively produce particular temporalities and privilege particular actions.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I examine how contemporary governance is increasingly structured through competing and overlapping temporal discourses of crisis, emergency, and urgency. Rather than treating these terms as descriptive labels for exceptional events, I conceptualize crisis talk, emergency talk, and urgency talk as governance practices that actively produce particular temporalities through compressing time, suspending futures, and reordering horizons of action. Building on critical scholarship on temporality, securitization, and scenario-based governance, I argue that these discourses do not merely respond to disruption but themselves function as technologies of disruption, reshaping how political problems are framed, anticipated, and governed.

Through a comparative analysis of policy documents, planning exercises, and scenario practices in the fields of security, public health, and energy, I demonstrate how each modlity mobilizes a distinct temporal logic. Crisis talk constructs moments of decisive rupture that demand interpretation and choice; emergency talk legitimizes exceptional authority and accelerated intervention; and urgency talk normalizes permanent acceleration and continuous readiness. I further introduce the concept of disrupting temporalities to capture how these discourses simultaneously destabilize established temporal orders and install new ones that privilege immediacy over deliberation.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst grassroots activists seeking to mobilise against political and religious extremism in the Kansas Republican Party, I ask what is lost - analytically and politically - when crisis is not met with urgency?

Paper long abstract

‘Crisis’ has been a productive organising metaphor for government policymaking as well as political and intellectual life. Invocations of ‘crisis’ are often matched with calls for ‘urgency’. But so many of these crises (e.g. climate change, growing economic and social inequalities, war) appear to be worsening in an increasingly febrile and polarised world. Are our communities, institutions and nations ill-equipped to answer the call for urgency? Or does urgency predispose us to shut down debate and curtail new analytical and political opportunities in our rush to be seen to be speaking to crisis?

I will address these questions, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I have been carrying out on American democracy and political culture since 2006. My field site is the greater Kansas City metropolitan area, where I studied the now-defunct ‘moderate’ wing of the Kansas Republican Party. For several decades, the political and social sciences framed the fate of the secular Republican moderate – a figure progressive on questions of civil and reproductive rights, ‘culture war’ issues and public education – as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ of American democracy. This trope also enjoyed currency in wider media, politics and popular culture.

What is 'lost' when crisis is not met with urgency? Has the moderate Republican, that rarest of political species, become another victim to a lost political future, in Mark Fisher’s world of ‘capitalist realism’? And how might both my ethnographic subjects and the social sciences (including anthropology) be complicit in the ‘killing’ of the metaphorical canary?

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how water infrastructures shape competing urgencies around climate and sustainability. By organizing time, attention, and pressure, they determine what feels urgent, inevitable, or deferrable in everyday urban life.

Paper long abstract

Water infrastructures do more than manage flows, levels, and quality. In concrete ways, they organize time, concentrate attention, and make specific issues feel pressing or unavoidable. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in and around Klagenfurt and the renowned Wörthersee, this contribution explores how urgencies emerge through water infrastructures and their maintenance.

The study focuses on lakeshores, canals, treatment facilities, and flood protection systems, showing how infrastructures are embedded within overlapping temporalities, including administrative schedules, seasonal change, and climatic uncertainty. For the time being, rather abstract climate and sustainability objectives become tangible through concrete demands that are intricately intertwined with projections, transitions, and anticipatory measures. In this process, the pursuit of climate neutrality emerges as one concern among many, articulated through expectations regarding timing, preparedness, and future risk, and sometimes framed as an ethical necessity with ‘no alternative’.

Routine practices of construction, upkeep, repair, and care translate these demands into material interventions, directing attention toward certain risks while sidelining others and producing uneven experiences of urgency and participation. In this sense, infrastructures are kept not only intact, but in tact, maintaining established modes of operation, knowledge, and response under pressure. Such recurrent interactions with water form expectations, distribute care and responsibility unevenly, and generate affectively charged senses of urgency that are experienced, negotiated, and contested in urban life. In doing so, they condense pressure into specific infrastructural sites and practices, foregrounding water infrastructures as key locations where competing urgencies are organized.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography among climate activists in the UK and Estonia, this paper examines urgency as a contested politics of futurity. It shows how competing crises dispossess climate actors of imagined futures and force the urgent reconfiguration of political and personal time, affect and action.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores urgency as a political and affective force through which futures are claimed, foreclosed, and unevenly distributed. I will draw on ethnographic research among the UK climate activists, and the Estonian climate-aware groups operating in the context where climate has slipped from attention because of numerous competing urgencies. This comparative material allows me to examine how urgency is mobilized and enacted in differently placed struggles over a better future, how it is employed to demonstrate the underlying systemic issues, and what are the shifts in the practices of such groups in response.

Rather than approaching urgency solely as excess or acceleration, the paper foregrounds urgency as attrition: a process through which climate claims lose traction as they compete within hierarchized economies of immediacy. In this competition, certain urgencies are delegitimized or erased, and climate aware warnings of anticipated losses, projected catastrophes, and irreversible thresholds are rendered impotent. Competing urgency claims advanced by state actors and climate-sceptic publics reframe transition itself as a threat, and complicate democratic effectiveness. Rather than resolving conflict, urgency politics intensify antagonisms, demand economising and effectiveness, and impose hierarchies of urgencies. Mapping the prospective memories of activists, I will explore how the climate concerned groups recognise and confront being dispossessed from the future they had imagined, and face the prospect of having to urgently build a new one. By situating urgency within struggles over futurity I explore anthropologically urgency as a human tool to reorganize political time, moral hierarchies, and democratic possibilities.

Paper short abstract

After the 2021 Taliban takeover, many Afghans migrated to Pakistan. Desiring resettlement, they protested hoping to gain international attention. They later protested against deportations. UNHCR and other INGOs, responding to urgent calls, prioritised cases, raising practical and ethical questions.

Paper long abstract

In August 2021 the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan left many in a situation of panic and fear. Over 600,000 Afghans made their way to Pakistan within the first months, hoping to be evacuated or resettled to third countries. With the onset of war in Ukraine, many of them felt stuck, neglected and ignored by the ‘international community’. Thus, they staged a sit-in protest in the federal capital of Pakistan, Islamabad, in April 2022. They attempted to highlight the need of an urgent action – through their slogans ‘Kill Us’ and ’Save Us’ – for their safety, security and better future. However, continuing for over five months, the protest did not yield any immediate results in the favour of the Afghans.

In 2023, Pakistan announced a deportation program, which led to another state of urgency in a crisis that was otherwise mostly treated as non-urgent. The panic created in response led to mass return migrations, with more than 375,000 Afghans forced to leave Pakistan in merely two months. The situation worsened in 2025, with some Afghans again resorting to protesting, against the deportations.

Though UNHCR had resumed its resettlement program for the Afghans, in 2022, only a few thousand could be referred for that. Similarly, some organisations also came to selectively support these refugees for relocation. In such a situation, two questions arise; Practical: ‘what cases to be prioritised for an urgent response?’, Ethical: ‘should the life experiences of the migrants be viewed in comparison, to assess a need of action?’

Paper short abstract

Climate change is often viewed as an urgent crisis, yet its impacts usually do not prompt action in urban life. This paper explores why heat is a non-concern for different socio-economic groups and shows how its management and experience reveal deep inequalities in care and non-care.

Paper long abstract

Climate change is often characterized as an urgent crisis; however, its manifestations in everyday urban life frequently fail to mobilize immediate action among different societal groups. This paper seeks to scrutinize the apparent lack of urgency concerning heat despite its intensifying nature and well-documented health risks.

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in Klagenfurt/Austria, the paper examines the social production of non-care, highlighting how it is influenced by unequal material conditions, diverse emotional responses, and competing urgencies. For economically privileged actors, the management of heat is facilitated through financial means such as air-conditioned homes, secondary residences, mobility, and leisure infrastructures, thereby allowing climate change to be perceived as a controllable or even pleasurable phenomenon. In stark contrast, economically marginalized actors frequently regard heat as an unavoidable and normalized facet of their lived experience, one that necessitates endurance rather than proactive engagement. For them, heat is subordinated to pressing obligations related to caregiving, precarious working and living situations, and pervasive physical and mental health challenges.

The case of heat in Klagenfurt shows that urgency itself is socially uneven and cannot be assumed as a shared condition. What appears as climate indifference is better understood as an effect of unequal temporal, material, and affective capacities to care. By foregrounding non-care as a relational practice, the paper challenges universalizing notions of urgency in climate debates and calls for a more situated understanding of climate action, and one that does not merely operate within existing inequalities but actively seeks to address and reduce them.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how urgency is handled and politicised in official and community level responses to increased flooding at the Chad-Cameroon borderland. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in towns towns, it explores the spatialities and temporalities of preparedness in times of climate change.

Paper long abstract

Seasonal floods in the Chad–Cameroon river borderland have intensified in recent years, repeatedly destroying homes, livelihoods and key infrastructure (OCHA 2022; 2025) and producing pendular mobilities that unsettle long standing social and territorial arrangements (Maazaz 2025). Municipal and state officials invoke scarce resources and administrative constraints to justify widespread institutional inertias despite genuine duty commitments, akin to other contexts in the Global South (Hendriks 2024). Meanwhile, various cross-border communities such as the Mosgoum people articulate their own discursive and practical responses to navigate the recurring devastations of excess waters, thereby mobilizing kinship networks, popular economies, and improvised forms of collective preparedness.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in twin towns along the border, this paper examines how urgency is articulated and embodied in both top-down and bottom-up responses to climate related disasters, foremost among them flash floods. Engaging with debates around the “hidden transcripts of resilience,” (Grove 2013), it explores how competing claims of urgency shape the temporalities of preparedness, ethical regimes and forms of participation and exclusion that emerge in the wake of repeated flooding.

By tracing how flash floods expose and deepen inequalities in land access, social and political capital, the paper shows how urgency is manipulated to rework local relations between state and municipal actors, NGOs, and affected communities. Ultimately, it argues that the politics of urgency in flood prone context illuminates broader dynamics of climate governance in the Global South, where crisis narratives, resource scarcity, and moral claims intersect to shape the possibilities and limits of collective resilience.