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- Convenors:
-
Tine Damsholt
(University of Copenhagen)
Marie Sandberg (University of Copenhagen)
Fredrik Nilsson (Åbo Akademi University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- TEMPORALITIES
- Location:
- Room K-205
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The future is emerging as an ethnographic site. We invite papers revisiting the future: revisiting ideas about the future’s role in contemporary societies, public discourses, individual narratives, and how future is anticipated, experienced, articulated, materialized, and practised in everyday life.
Long Abstract:
The future has often been perceived as something remote, imagined, and unknowable, which we cannot investigate ethnographically. Now, conversations about the future as an ethnographic site are emerging: The collapse of future in sites of conflict, or the chronic temporariness and uncertainty of the future among refugees. The global climate and environmental crises we are verging on calls for a more urgent understanding of the future. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted instant dystopias of food shortage and is still destabilizing future anticipations, as family rituals and the everyday at home surfaced as sites for political interventions. Like other rhythms, durations, and temporalities, the future is also shaped by and materialized in objects of consumption, digital devices, or materials such as plastic. In everyday life near future and immediate present may compete with distant futures reaching beyond one’s own lifetime. Yet, experimental spaces and radical activism also perform micro-utopias of hope and transition. In short, we need to pay attention to the ways future arises and resides in the quotidian actions and interactions (cf. Bryant & Knight 2019).
Thus, we invite for a revisiting of the future – to investigate and discuss ethnographic approaches to and ideas about the future’s role in contemporary societies, public discourses, individual narratives, and how future is anticipated, experienced, articulated, materialized, and practised in everyday life. The panel welcomes papers revisiting the future in the history of our disciplines, in public life, political discourses and narratives, individual life stories, in times of crisis, and in mundane micro-practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Cultural heritage is often perceived to be about the past, and its role in the present. This paper argues that an equally important aspect of cultural heritage preservation is the future. What role and effect does different perceptions of the future have on preservation ideas and practices?
Paper long abstract:
Many decisions and actions within heritage preservation are motivated by the future, legitimised by future scenarios, and is aiming for specifically expressed future outcomes. How we think about the future affect the choices that are made in the present. Likewise, the future, in this case heritage futures, are also directly made by our choices, actions and ideas in the present.
This paper is based on the results of a survey in Norway, directed to people engaged in volunteer work in local historical organisations. What ideas of, and motivations for, preservation informs the interests and action of people not professionally employed within the heritage sector, and who often concerns themselves with local cultural heritage?
The paper discusses four discourses of future-thinking based on the responses: the stability discourse, where the future is much or less regarded as being very similar to the present and today’s preservation practices and ideas can be upheld. The discourse of change, which concerns a future that are believed to involve change, for example climate change, and its possible and predicted effect on cultural heritage. The discourse of uncertainty, that contains expressions about the difficulty to think and act with regard to the future, due to the impossibility of knowing it. Finally, responsibility, where no specific futures are imagined, but an overall sense of responsibility toward the future to preserve cultural heritage is fundamental.
The paper discusses how these different ways of relating to the future is expressed in the survey, and what their implications may be.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation aims to explore how young people articulate an uncertain future in an era of climate crisis and major societal changes. However, uncertainty about the future is a reappearing phenomenon and could therefore well be studied intertextually.
Paper long abstract:
Our natural environment is in a state of rapid and dramatic change, not least because of human intervention. Human influence on the earth’s geology, biodiversity, and climate has created a new global uncertainty about the future. Concepts such as climate crisis and climate catastrophes form part of the narrative of a dystopian future in the media and the political discourse. Climate change is present both in the landscape and in political discourse, but it is also felt, sensed and apprehended emotionally as part of the fabric of everyday life, not least among young people.
This presentation aims to explore how young people come to terms with the loss of the idea of a future. However, feelings of uncertainty in regard to the future is not a new phenomenon. The fear of life-threatening events and futures is a constant presence in history. By focusing on children’s narratives of fear and worries of the climate crisis in the contemporary as well as archival material about uncertain times, I will examine the ways in which children and young people relate to a future in the Anthropocene and how the narratives of an uncertain future are related to historical narratives of fear and uncertainty. In what sense is the idea of dramatic change incorporated in the biographical narratives of young people?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between past and future, and the implications of "too late", in policy documents on pacific oysters and king crabs in Norway, asking how temporal understandings in invasive species management tie in with and differ from those of other environmental problems.
Paper long abstract:
"Too late" is a temporal concept that appears in many different environmental discourses. In climate change discourses and discourses on biodiversity loss, "too late" often signposts a deterministic view of the future. The idea that something is "too late" restricts what futures are possible to imagine, as well as how much freedom of choice such futures contain.
In management discussions concerning so-called invasive alien species, however, "too late" is also used in a different fashion. Invasive alien species are defined as animals and plants that are introduced by humans into a natural environment where they are not normally found, with serious negative consequences for their new environment. Although "too late" is used to indicate that it is considered impossible to remove an invasive species from the area it has invaded, it is also used as an argument for redefining invasive alien species from environmental threats to economic resources.
Through a study of Norwegian policy documents on invasive alien species such as Pacific oysters and king crabs, this paper explores the relationship between past and future, and the implications of "too late", in discourses regarding invasive alien species. On what temporal scales are they considered aliens? How do temporal understandings in invasive species management tie in with and differ from those of other environmental problems? How does "too late" become an argument for redefining invasive alien species from environmental threats to economic resources, and what changes in the understanding of nature do such arguments entail?
Paper short abstract:
Shifting from animal-based to plant-based diets has been pinpointed as an effective way for people to combat climate change in their everyday lives. Can an idea of a better future for our grandchildren help us eat more vegetables?
Paper long abstract:
In Iceland, a three-year inter-disciplinary research project was launched in 2020, titled Sustainable Healthy Diets: Filling the Gaps and Paving the Way for a Sustainable Future. It brings together experts in food, nutrition and environmental sciences, engineering, agriculture, ethnology, and economy, to figure out how to facilitate a transition toward sustainable and healthy diets in Iceland.
How can such a change come about in a country where currently only 2% of the population live up to the official recommendations of daily vegetable intake? To explore the cultural aspects of such a shift, an ethnographic inquiry is being made into the food practices of people in Iceland who have already turned to diets considered to be more sustainable, such as vegans, flexitarians, and organic consumers. This paper will take a look at some of the initial empirical material, gathered through a qualitative questionnaire and in-depth interviews, specifically exploring the temporalities at play.
How and why have these people changed their eating habits? How does a perception of the future (in their own lifetime, as well as the more distant future of the next generations) play a part in achieving and maintaining new food practices? What promises do concepts such as 'health' and 'sustainability' hold for the future?
Paper short abstract:
”Time traveller” memes craft scenarios where a character from the future inadvertently reveals too much about the state of things to come – and how false many notions of the present are. This future knowledge is constructed as a disruption, but the humorous tone helps address current uncertainties.
Paper long abstract:
The future has been a site of memetic creativity for as long as popular culture has imagined alternative paths for human civilization to take. A revealing meme, originating from an abundant pool of 19th and 20th century fiction, is the use of a ”time traveller” as a character who arrives to disrupt our current existence – or, perhaps, a certain moment in the past – by inadvertently giving information that only future people have. For example, as COVID-19 was gaining ground, a meme image had the time traveller first ask, ”What year is it?”, to which ”Me” answered: ”It’s 2020.” The response from the time traveller, ”Oh. The first year of quarantine,” then upsets the Me-character by accidentally revealing that such quarantines will not be over for a long time. Sadly, this meme from almost two years ago did predict the future accurately.
In this paper, I look at the way such images play with the idea of ”future knowledge” and our current (perhaps limited) expectations concerning the future. As disruptions, these memes reconfigure our current epistemological positions by offering an alternative vision of the present moment, filtered through the future. Often, they show pessimistic tendencies, but as such memes ultimately serve a humorous function, this means that they help us deal with (entirely possible) negative future models in a soothing way.