Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This contribution focuses on a coastal site, where the future was told as an impossibility, calling for an urgent need of alternative futures. In sites predicted as lost due to climate change, how can one explore the future as responsive to present coalitions and bring alternatives to the fore?

Paper long abstract

This contribution focuses on a site deemed as a site with no future, as it was predicted impossible to defend against rising seas in 30 years-time, calling for the urgent need of alternative imaginaries. It centers on coastal habitats and communities, which are likely to undergo radical transformations over the coming decades as sites, where resilient modes of living, planning and relating are either being developed, or otherwise in urgent need. In places categorised as lost due to climate change, how can one explore subtle and not so subtle changes in revealing the future as responsive to the present moment and, in this way, bring a wider variety of possibilities to the fore? Reflecting on what comprises alternative imaginaries and reinforces infrastructures of anticipation, this contribution traces, by example of this coastal community, who was included in different versions of future making and explores community-rooted action and interventions. It reflects upon which ideas were able to assert themselves in contesting dominant predictions and narratives as well as highlighting uncertainties and errors in future-making. In a dialogue between new materialist thought, environmental humanities and artistic strategies, the paper explores questions around the politics of representation, notions of responsibility as well as imaginaries that each in turn shape and impact the perception of alternative futures.