Organized by the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, Institute of Sociology, Institute of Human Geography and the Lab for Studies of Science and Technology (LaSST)

The future is not something that is yet to come. It‘s rather the cumulative effect of various practices that take place in the present. Whereas planning, projecting and predicting have been widely recognized as established future-making practices in the social sciences, recently there has been a growing interest in socio-technical arrangements that seek to anticipate more contingent futures. Such socio-technical arrangements aim to „fix futures“ in the sense that they try to simultaneously provide stability and recognize the need for repair in the context of various crises.

This joint lecture series of the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, the Institute of Sociology, the Institute of Human Geography, and the Lab for Studies of Science and Technology (LaSST) brings together renowned anthropologists, human geographers and sociologists to differently respond to the claim that the contemporary moment is characterized by a distinct future-orientation. From environmental governance to demilitarisation, the lectures will consider which futures are being fixed, the particular technologies and techniques involved in these future-making processes, and the political possibilities they open up.

Summer Term 2022, Wed. 6-8 pm (ct) – Attendance possible both on Campus Westend, Seminarhouse, SH 2.105 and online!

Pleaser register via ka-hiwis@em.uni-frankfurt.de

 

When: 6pm 20.04.2022

Christopher Kelty (UCLA)

Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can’t Problematize

This talk reports some absurdities of environmental governance in a particular place: Los Angeles, California. It focuses on three urban ecological and wildlife controversies: the environmental impact of feral cats cared for by humans, the secondary effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on predatory and scavenging birds and mammals; and the restoration of a wetlands sacred to local Native American peoples, degraded by both oil drilling and conservation. Central to all of them are techno-political tools: environmental impact reports, mitigation bank and credits systems, pesticide registration review. Each of these tools fix the future by defining the present and testing the impacts of different futures–evidence-based policy making. Yet as a pragmatic form, they do much more: they slow down the future in some ways, and speed it up in others; they instantiate certain pasts over others, and they become intense affective fields around which the possibility of argument unfolds. I argue that this does not always happen along predictable lines, serving as a bulwark against a damaging future in some cases and a roadblock to a desired change in others.

 

When: 6pm 11.05.202

Andrew Barry, Evelina Gambino (University College London)

The Labour of Capitalisation

This lecture seeks to engage with recent debates around the capitalisation of infrastructure by interrogating how capitalized futures are both fixed and destabilised in the present. We understand the capitalisation of infrastructure as a project aimed at extracting future profit into the present. Rather than a smooth process, capitalisation is sustained by all manners of efforts that bridge between the future, the present and the past. In particular, we argue that there is a need to attend to the specific forms of specialist labour going into the capitalisation of infrastructural projects which we term the labour of capitalisation, which is expected to stabilise or fix the future and to render it predictable and manageable, acting on and through time. The lecture draws on the fieldwork that we have undertaken, together and independently, across three of the major infrastructural projects that have sustained developmental trajectory of the Republic of Georgia since its independence. In the cases we outline, and others, the capitalisation of infrastructure gives rise to diverse types of anti-capitalisation, destabilising or disrupting the performance of the different forms of labour on which capitalisation relies.

 

When: 6pm 22.06.2022

Andrea Ballestero (University of Southern California)

Aquifers and Ethnography at the Edge of a Concept

Imagining what life will become in the near future, public officials and community members on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast are coming together to take responsibility for underground water worlds. In the process they oscillate between two concepts: groundwater and aquifers. Groundwater efficiently conveys a sense of water as a fungible unit that can be exchanged, banked, or spent. In contrast, the figure of the aquifer activates a grounded concept whereby land, liquid, and history are inseparable. In this talk, I query how people move from groundwater to aquifers, and back. I ask what are the stakes of doing so, and what kind of responsibility for subterranean water worlds are possible in that movement? More broadly, I examine what happens to responsibility when people live and act at the edge of a concept?

 

When: 6pm 13.07.2022

Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University)

Demilitarisation, open worlds, and reparative futures

The closed world is a trope, articulated most famously by historian of science Paul Edwards (1996), for the technopolitical imaginary of dominance and containment that underwrote the Cold War arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union at the close of the 20th century. Set against this imperial stand-off is a decolonial imaginary named by anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (2018) as “a world of many worlds.” A world of many worlds is a pluriverse that exceeds the imperial closed world, comprising multiple ongoing processes of worlding that are partially connected, but also ultimately incommensurable and uncontainable.

Through a critical examination of the current U.S. project of Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), this talk examines the rebirth of artificial intelligence (AI) as the promissory technological fix aimed at securing militarism’s future. I turn from there to recent challenges to this technopolitical imaginary, based on critical scholarship, investigative journalism, and creative diplomacy, which provide evidence for the continued escape of conflict from the frames of rational action and control on which militarism depends. These counter-stories challenge the military’s attempt to make clean demarcations of enmity within complex relations of affinity and difference, recovering the realities that escape military operations and opening spaces in which to consider demilitarisation and the possibilities for reparative future-making.