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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-206
- Sessions:
- Thursday 16 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 Thursday 16 June, 2022, -Ann-Charlotte Palmgren (Åbo Akademi University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I discuss the moving relations between past, present, and future while discussing experiences of the future. The paper builds on interviews with youth about their experiences of temporality, with a focus on current and past experiences of waiting on the future.
Paper long abstract:
Discussions on temporality and the future are no stranger in youth studies within the humanities. For example, discourses on the ways youth orient themselves towards the future have shaped past and recent youth studies. Following Melucci (1996, p. 3), time is one of the categories through which we construct our experience.
This paper builds on interviews conducted with Finland-Swedish youth and young adults about their experiences of temporality, with a special focus on questions related to the future. Interview questions related to waiting are especially interesting for this paper. I have for example asked the youth what they are waiting for in life and what it feels like to wait for these things, but also about earlier experiences of waiting, such as waiting to start school as a child or waiting to turn eighteen.
Through the interviews, I discuss the messy and moving relations between past, present, and future, when focusing on the future. In addition, the paper shows how ecological transformations in the era of the Anthropocene and other societal changes shape how possible futures are encountered and understood.
Saša Poljak Istenič (ZRC SAZU) Valentina Gulin Zrnic (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research)
Paper short abstract:
The paper provides an ethnographic account of young people's "future-thinking" and "future-making". It analyses their "future literacy" and perceived agency to create different, new, and better (urban) futures while reflecting on how to research the future ethnographically.
Paper long abstract:
"Europe needs the vision, engagement and participation of all young people to build a better future, that is greener, more inclusive and digital," announced the European Commission when it declared 2022 the European Year of Youth. In line with the belief that the "world stands on youth", as the Slovenian and Croatian saying goes, their agency has been probably best recognized in Fridays for future movement, which is seen as a historical turn in (climate) activism. However, organizations working with youth increasingly raise awareness that many young people are not empowered to imagine (and act towards) a (collective) future.
The presentation, deriving from the Slovenian-Croatian research project 'Urban Futures', relies on the ethnographic research of how futures are imagined and how these visions and expectations inform actions in the present intended to create different, new and better (urban) futures. It pays attention to diverse approaches young people claim to undertake for the(ir) future, from protests to public actions not recognized as future-making and private acts inserted in the routine of everyday life. By focusing on their agency to imagine and activate their personal and collective futures linked to the cities and towns they live or study in, the paper, on the one hand, analyses their "future literacy" (cf. Unesco) and, on the other hand, reflects on how to prompt their "future-thinking" and self-understanding of their "future-making".
Blanka Henriksson (Åbo Akademi University)
Paper short abstract:
Young adults moving from Finland to Sweden narrate an adventure in the present. The future becomes hard to visualise though, since everything depends on two options; staying or returning. This paper investigates constructions of the future in contemporary personal experience narratives on migration.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on interviews with Swedish-speaking young adults who have moved from Finland to Sweden in the late 2010’s. Regardless of whether they moved to study, work or just find themselves, they tend to narrate this ongoing part of their life as an adventure, something exiting. They are in the period of life between adolescence and adulthood, marked by searching for and experimenting with identity.
As their peers they see different goals in their future and they talk of graduating, finding a good job, making a career and starting a family. This corresponds with the idea of emerging adulthood and the ideal of self-realization, where studies and future career development are important parts (Arnett, 2004).
This future becomes hard to visualise though, since they are often unsure of whether they are staying in Sweden or moving back to Finland. Different factors are pulling and pushing in both directions, and though some informants are dead set on staying (or leaving), many seem to find it hard to see a future in either country.
This paper investigates constructions of futures in personal experience narratives, when these young migrants try to verbalise where they see themselves in the long run, and what factors they think will be important for their choices when it comes to staying or returning. These constructions of futures contain colliding concepts where for example a good job might be connected to one country but a family to the other, making the future in itself hard to imagine.
Erika De Vivo (Università degli Studi di Torino)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines how Márkomeannu2018 festival prompted a discussion about what the future may hold by hinging upon a narrative about the future grounded in Sámi history, shaped by contemporary concerns and articulated through Indigenous speculative fiction, site-specific art, participatory theatre
Paper long abstract:
In 2018, Sámi of all ages gathered at Gállogieddi (Norwegian Sápmi) to attend the 19th edition of the MárkaSámi festival Márkomeannu. Unlike previous editions, Markomeannu2018 revolved around a highly articulated festival concept. The plotline, set in a time yet to come, is an example of Indigenous speculative fiction implemented through site-specific art and a 3-days collective theatre performance: Sáŋgarat máhccet.
Upon entering the festival premises, festivalgoers were ideally projected 100 years from now. In 2118 – at the threshold of our immediate progeny’s lifetime – a near-apocalyptic scenario unfolds. Power struggles, nuclear warfare, colonial greed and anthropogenic disasters have plunged humanity into darkness, engulfing future generations in social oppression and ecological collapse. In this dystopic future, hidden from the controlling power of the Evil chancellor Ola Tjudi, only Gállogieddi stands as a micro-eutopia where Sámi people can live according to indigenous principles. The public was invited to play the role of future Sámi peoples, and hence to experience the future (as delineated in the plot) first-hand.
This contribution, based on interviews with Sámi cultural activists and on extended ethnographic fieldwork, examines Márkomeannu2118 narratives of the future by investigating the ideological reasons that led the festival organizers to choose such a daunting and challenging topic for the 2018 edition of Márkomeannu festival. The paper examines the multiple layers of meaning embedded in the festival-plot. It addresses how the plot’s core elements are deeply rooted in Sámi history(ies) while also hinting at what may happen if climate mitigation policies fail to succeed.