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- Convenors:
-
Richard Tutton
(University of York)
Jennifer Chubb (University of york)
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- Chair:
-
Richard Tutton
(University of York)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel challenges elite framings of existential risk, the threat of ecological catastrophe or civilizational collapse and addresses ‘everyday’ catastrophes and threats and how people negotiate complex interactions between their everyday lives and universalizing threats and risks.
Long Abstract:
We are regularly confronted with claims about existential risk, the threat of ecological catastrophe or civilizational collapse, as consequences of technoscientific and technoeconomic developments. Such claims clearly have a performative effect, garnering significant media and political attention and resources to elite institutions which seek to speak for the interests of humanity as a whole. Examples include The Future of Humanity Institute or the Future of Life Institute, which are influential in publicly defining long term risks and threats. This panel takes these developments as a point of departure for contributors to examine and challenge such elite framings and to address how technoscientific risk and threats are experienced by different social actors. We invite papers that consider ‘everyday’ catastrophes and threats encountered by people, for whom catastrophes are not necessarily a future event but an immanent feature of their past or present lives. In doing so, this panel is guided by the work in STS by Michael (2017) on the relationship between ‘big futures and little futures’ and in sociology of futures by Coleman and Lyon (2023) on ‘everyday futures’, which focuses on ‘quotidian imaginations and makings of futures’. Further to the claims and counterclaims of great societal transformations, this panels asks: who has the power to narrate catastrophe, collapse or existential risk? Who and what is marginalized or discounted by such hegemonic framings? What is entailed in recasting existential risk otherwise: not a ‘global scale’ but in relation to individuals, communities and places? How are marginalized or impoverished people negotiating a sense that their everyday existence is being disaffirmed by technoscientific and technoeconomic changes? How are ‘everyday risk and threats’ understood, felt and acted upon through everyday actions? How do people make sense of and negotiate the complex interactions between their everyday lives and universalizing threats and risks?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Ronja Mikoleit (Forest Research Institute Baden-Württemberg (FVA), Germany) Carolin Maier
Short abstract:
With forests dying, the existential threat of climate change materializes in people’s backyards. How do people and professional foresters relate to these changes? We examine these dynamics using qualitative interviews and participatory observation from a case study in south-west Germany.
Long abstract:
Forests are places where human bodies are surrounded by non-human nature, a counter-world to mechanized, urbanized and daily life, a workplace and economic space, and a strongly identity-forming landscape element. Between 2018 and 2022, large-scale forest dieback in Germany has rapidly altered entire landscapes. In many regions, large areas of drought and bark-beetle damaged trees have been removed, and in some places, forests have disappeared completely, turning former forests into dystopic sceneries.
With forests dying, the existential threat of climate change thus materializes in people’s backyards. How do people living in these regions relate to these changes in their immediate natural surroundings, and how do professional foresters, traditionally proud of their long-term forest planning and being in charge of the forest’s everyday management, experience and react to them?
We examine these dynamics using qualitative interviews and participatory observation from a case study in south-west Germany. We present results from our reconstructive analysis, focusing on patterns of public and professional forest-related perceptions and practices – how do people make sense of these changes? What positionings, practices and bodies of knowledge become strained, and which ones become invigorated?
We identify reactional patterns of consternation, powerlessness and social distancing, of wishful thinking, reassurance, and holding on, of disorientation, painful habitual disruptions and unsettled professional identities. What is striking is the apparent need for simplyfing complexities by identifying clear counterparts to one’s own position, and framing these developments as components of specific non-forest related societal developments, which are described as beyond one’s influence.
Allison Jeffrey (Cape Breton University)
Short abstract:
This paper shares findings from a study with movement practitioners in a rural post-industrial town plagued by crises. Engaging feminist posthumanist philosophy in post-qualitative research design, this study reveals how non/human bodies are becoming-together in complex contemporary times.
Long abstract:
The experience of living during precarious times is influencing embodied experiences. Recent research on movement practitioners processing despair during pandemic reveals how communities are responding to the challenges of our times through the relations they are cultivating (Jeffrey et al., 2021). Importantly, these relations are existing in a continual state of becoming as multiple amorphous crises continue to influence everyday life, and are being articulated through findings gathered in movement cultures (Humberstone, 2022; Olive, 2022). Studies on moving bodies demonstrate how practitioners are engaging with environments in crisis, and illuminate the need to expand understandings to acknowledge the ways that human/nonhuman bodies are intricately woven into tapestries of becomings during complex times (Braidotti, 2020). Through this paper, I engage Haraway’s (2016) concept of making kin, as moving practices that are cultivating communities of non/human kin situated in environments that are in crisis. Being ontologically inspired by this framework, I imagine how the design of post-qualitative research can support the active cultivation of multi-species futures that incorporate both the joy and destruction of our times. In this paper, I share movement practitioners' experiences of joy and connection, anguish and loneliness being experienced during a range of movement practices (dance, yoga, swimming, walking) hosted indoors, outdoors and online. The purpose of this paper is to ignite a curiosity around the role of research with moving bodies in precarious times, and the potential for posthumanist frameworks to cultivate findings that embrace both the generative and destructive relational experiences that influence movement practices.
Kathleen Lynch (New York University)
Short abstract:
Using in-depth interviews with disaster-exposed residents of the US Gulf Coast, this paper explores how communities with cumulative environmental exposure make sense of competing existential risks and anticipate their uncertain climate futures.
Long abstract:
Environmental disasters are increasing in frequency and severity and pose substantial risk to health and well-being. The United States Gulf Coast is an environmental ‘sacrifice zone’ containing the largest density of petrochemical infrastructure in the Western Hemisphere (Davies, 2018) where acute extreme exposure events amplify the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of toxic pollution. Yet despite growing technoscientific attention toward predicting multi-hazard risks (Binita et al., 2020), there has been little investigation into the ways Gulf Coast residents negotiate the existential threats of toxic exposure in the everyday. Drawing from in-depth interviews with disaster-exposed Gulf Coast residents, this paper explores the ways communities navigate and perceive health risks—particularly cancer risk—in the context of cumulative environmental exposure. Drawing on Fortun’s et al.’s (2021) Quotidian Anthropocenes concept, I examine how the dual existential risks of climate change and carcinogenesis become intertwined, felt, and negotiated in everyday decision-making. Here, interlocutors exhibit ‘toxic frustration’ (Singer 2011) at perceived technoscientific ignorance of their own environmental suffering in favor of large-scale coastal restoration projects. In the absence of any ‘post-event’ imaginary, those with cumulative exposure become trapped in a continuous mode of ‘recalibration’ (Coleman and Lyon, 2023), engaging in a process of retrospective accounting to make sense of—and anticipate—uncertain futures. Grounded in these narratives and in dialogue with a Sociology of Futures, this paper posits that risk perception in the context of cumulative exposures manifests as "anticipatory loss" of place and health status, which informs everyday imaging of and resistance to future events.