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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:
Based on Jernbanebyen in Copenhagen as an empirical example of urban transformation, this paper explores the involvement of “objects of the past” as design drivers for the development of future cityscapes.
Paper long abstract:
In 2021, the Danish architect firm Cobe won a competition for the urban renewal of Jernbanebyen (the Railway City), a 365.000 m2 area in central Copenhagen consisting of large-scale workshops and maintaining facilities for diesel locomotives and train sets. The purpose of the competition was to design a master plan for transforming the area into a new sustainable and welcoming neighborhood.
My role on the Cobe team was to develop principles for preserving the legacy of a location that from 1900 to this day has been devoted to the maintenance of large machinery and to which public access was highly restricted. In my paper, I will present the cultural analysis involved in fulfilling this task.
When recognized as reminiscences of the past objects become what Jacques Derrida has conceptualized as “traces” and “tracks”. As objects of the past, they not only confirm the past as being different from the present, they also have the potential to become containers for the past enabling it to travel into the future (in Danish, the dual quality is captured in the word “spor”).
Through empirical examples from our competition material, I will present how this approach was incorporated as a design parameter in the winning proposal.
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses how the future is imagined by women being interviewed about their personal experiences regarding unintended pregnancy in Finland, and what these imagined futures could tell us about contemporary society
Paper long abstract:
In my doctoral thesis, I analyze interviews where women tell me about their experience(s) of unintended pregnancy(ies) in Finland in the 2010s. My aim is to study how women can make sense of their experiences of an unintended pregnancy through discourses and materiality like the body, the pill or new technology, with a special focus on power relations like gender, class and age. In many of the interviews, the women talk about a choice being made, and this choice is often influenced by imagined futures for themselves, with children or without, or imagined futures for other people involved such as previous children or a partner. In this paper, I want to explore these imagined futures further.
What can the imagined futures tell us about contemporary society? In what way are the women oriented towards different imagined futures and what aspects are imagined as possible versus impossible? What role does the future have in these individual narratives of unintended pregnancy? How does the imagined futures unfold in the interviews and from what point are these alternate futures being imagined, and who’s future is it that is imagined? How are positions like gender, class and age performed in relation to the future?
Paper short abstract:
Can the mundane practices of clothing carried by young Danes be understood as a case of material participation in current and future climate and environmental crises (Jungnickel 2021, Marres 2016)? When, where, how, and why? And how might such practices relate to other everyday concerns?
Paper long abstract:
Fast fashion is becoming faster and more damaging to our planet. At the same time, we do see a surge in less natural resource-demanding production processes and consumption patterns (Niinimäki et al. 2020).
These developments prompt us to ask: Can the mundane practices of clothing carried by young Danes be understood as a case of material participation in the climate and environmental crises (Jungnickel 2021, Marres 2016)? When, where, how, and why? And how might such practices relate to other everyday concerns?
The empirical materials are worked up in a teaching-based research collaboration (Damsholt & Sandberg 2018) with The House of Sustainability Kolding (Bæredygtighedshuset Kolding), which is a hub for sustainability and green transitions established by Kolding Municipality in 2021. Together we – that is, students enrolled at the design master’s programmes at Design School Kolding (DSKD) and the design management master’s programme at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), researchers at DSKD, and professionals working at The House of Sustainability Kolding – will:
1) explore ethnographically how young Danes relate to and value their clothing;
2) enable the young Danes to act as co-analysts and co-designers of new and more sustainable clothing practices; and
3) scale the most promising of the new clothing practices.
We thus seek to extend Ethnology’s long-standing engagement with mundane clothing practices (Melchior 2021) by teasing out how current renderings of future climate and environmental crises enter into and – perhaps – transform how young Danes relate to and valuate (Heuts & Mol 2013) their clothing.
Paper short abstract:
Karl Popper argued that lessons from the past does not lead society forward, but visions of the future pull us into the future. Inspired by this, but not leaving history out, this paper will discuss how academic knowledge can be used in interaction with wider society, tackling future issues.
Paper long abstract:
How to address possible futures was the aim of LU Futura, an academic think tank at Lund University 2018-2021. LU Futura operated in the interface between the university and wider society, aiming to contribute to ongoing societal debates on future challenges, providing academic facts, analyses, and knowledge.
Important areas in the LU Futura work were questions of climate, working life, demography, health, learning and language. Since members in the Futura team were affiliated to all eight university faculties – Art, Economy, Humanities & Theology, Law, Medicine, Science, Social Science, Technology – we were also occupied by questions of interdisciplinarity, and what kind of knowledge this can generate.
Philosopher Karl Popper argued that it is not lessons from the past that leads society forwards, it is the visions of possible futures that pulls us into the future. Inspired by Poppers perspective but not leaving history out, LU Futura wanted to combine history with current visions of future, underlining that decisions of today reaches far into the future.
In this paper I will discuss some lessons learned in the LU Futura project:
- Conflicts of interest, visible not least in the field of sustainability and climate issues.
- Alternative ways of scientific communication, focusing on conversations, dialogues, exhibitions, guided fictional tours, film, podcasts.
- Alternative methods in exploring the future, focusing on preparing, not predicting possible futures.
Finally, some remarks on why both the rear view mirror and the crystal ball can be useful metaphorical tools for an ethnography of the future.