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- Convenors:
-
Edward Simpson
(SOAS)
Niamh Jane Clifford Collard (SOAS, University of London)
Richard Fardon (SOAS)
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- Stream:
- Climate Change
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In the time of climate change, it can seem as if our capacity to imagine the future differently has collapsed. This panel engages with the intersections between imagination, and the emerging anthropologies of futures and the anthropocene, to ask if 'imagination' is useful on a warming planet.
Long Abstract:
The world-altering challenges of anthropogenic climate change can be understood as a problem of temporal imaginaries gone awry. As the planet warms, our capacities to imagine the future differently are confronted with the seemingly-intractable dynamics of capital and the global scale and pace of environmental change. Drawing on scholarship which positions 'imaginary horizons' as borders which give shape to, and circumscribe, unfolding reality, this panel asks what imagining the future means in the time of climate change. In engaging with emerging anthropologies of the future and the anthropocene the panel will consider if 'imagination' is up to the task of crafting new, liveable worlds on a warming planet, and how else we might conceive of alternative planetary futures if not through the prism of imagination.
We welcome papers which explore the intersection between imagination, the anthropocene and futures. Key questions include, but are not limited to;
•what ethnography might look like in a time of radically uncertain planetary futures;
•what the relationship might be between imagination and climate change;
•whether imagination is an unevenly distributed social capacity and what this might mean in the anthropocene;
•what kind of social relations give shape to failures of imagination, and how such failures are experienced and thought about in the context of climate change;
•how technologies of imagining the future might be configured differently across social contexts;
•whether imagination can offer new ways of living through the anthropocene, and if not which constellations of future-oriented practices might bring forth new ways of living.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how insurance imagines agricultural futures. Insurance companies imply that they are better suited than farmers to gaze into the future and I will argue that in so doing insurance suggests boundaries to what is imaginable by whom in the face of climate change.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at how insurance imagines agricultural futures. Connecting to the recent interest in the nexus between climate change and risk management by sociology and geography (e.g. Taylor 2016, Isakson 2015, Elliot 2018), I will interrogate how insurance companies conceive and represent the growing uncertainties of environmental degradation and reimagine their place in the securing of agricultural livelihoods. Insurance companies see for themselves a role in bringing under control the precarity which farmers endure in the face of climate change, particularly in emerging economies. Embedded in the narratives of advertisements and reports are concerns and ominous prospects of unchecked climatic risks, while simultaneously showcasing a utilitarian sense of opportunity to transform the uncertainties into profit for shareholders. Following observations by Lehtonen (2017) and others, I suggest that by circumscribing agricultural risk as something to be brought under control through calculative finance, insurance companies imply that they are better suited than farmers to gaze into the future, imagine the growing risks of climate change and do something about them. Meanwhile farmers, it is asserted, do not have the technical means nor the cognitive capabilities to adequately estimate the future uncertainties facing them. They are accused of short-sightedness; unduly imagining untroubled futures for themselves and under-appreciating risks which lie beyond the present. This, I will argue, suggests boundaries to what is imaginable by whom and leads to specific roles for insurance and its customers vis-à-vis the future in a situation where the spectre of climate change looms large over agriculture.
Paper short abstract:
Proposing an aural cosmology of the Anthropocene, we offer an alternative modus to hear the 'hereness' of the language of ice as 'nonlife' (Povinelli, 2016). We claim that sculpted sensorial imaginaries might create a change that resounds in the here and now, and in our collective future anterior.
Paper long abstract:
In 'The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable' (2016), Indian writer Amitav Ghosh claims that in the age of the Anthropocene, the arts and humanities are presented with a tremendous challenge. His argument is that 'the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination', and more importantly that climate change is proving peculiarly resistant to artistic practices. In agreement with Ghosh's claim, we propose to engage with the panel theme via sound, in order to imagine ways of listening to and indeed learning from the so-called Anthropocene, so as to initiate a change that resounds. By working towards an aural cosmology of the Anthropocene, we offer an alternative way to hear and feel the 'hereness' of the language of 'nonlife' (Povinelli 2016). Building on our previous work ''Sounding' the Anthropocene', we present ways of "listening to ice" by critically engaging with two complementary compositions: the documentary 'Chasing Ice' (2012) and Ludovico Einaudi's 'Eulogy to the Arctic' (2016). While the former unapologetically screens calving glaciers, compressing years into seconds and thus capturing ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breath-taking rate, the latter is an aural meditation on the impact of white colonialism and its dramatic consequences on the environment. We claim that a critical examination of the ways in which anthrophonic, biophonic, and geophonic events - always already combined with silence(s) - can produce a different set of knowledges able to sculpt sensorial imaginaries of our collective future anterior.
Paper short abstract:
The spectre of urban catastrophe looms large in visual cultural histories. Contemporary disaster films envision utopian and dystopian futures. Hybrid mediascapes, situated between imagination and experience, offer discursive and affective possibilities for collective survival in the Anthropocene.
Paper long abstract:
Susan Sontag argues, "The imagery of disaster in science fiction [film] is… the emblem… of the inadequacy of most people's response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their consciousness…." (Sontag 1965) She asserts that the cinematic aesthetics of destruction and the pleasures of spectacle simultaneously entertain, distract, and make viewers apathetic. Conversely disaster films confront viewers with the somber impossibility of their own demise and reflect and reinforce cultural anxieties of invasion, fragmentation, and extinction. Catastrophic imagery onscreen act as social pressure valves and engender contradictory spaces of escapist refuge and collective catharsis. Historically visual and literary representation of urban cataclysms have provoked no less visceral, visible, problematic and paradoxical visions: Ragnarok in the Norse edda, Noah's flood in Chartres Cathedral's stained glass windows, and the Great Fire of London in anonymous seventeenth-century paintings. Such renderings variously served as salvatory promise, ideological screed, apotropaic ritual, philosophical meditation, earnest recordkeeping, communal mourning, dire warning, or ocular or aural pleasure. Current media—cinematic, cyber, or otherwise virtual--exploring and exploiting the disaster trope play similar roles: as technophilic market places, dystopian hurt lockers, or impossible Utopian escapes. Like the bygone neofuturist, humanist and pluralist city visions of Archigram and Metabolism, however, contemporary hybrid mediascapes may offer meaningful narratives to build more resilient social infrastructures. The convergence of virtual imaginaries with material landscapes creates critical discursive and affective tools for survival: to both imagine and respond to the unimaginable in the coming age of ecological collapse and social chaos the Anthropocene portends.