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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.