[Linganth] CFP AAA/CASCA 2019 So many futures, so little time

[Swinehart,Karl Frederic]

CFP AAA/CASCA 2019  So many futures, so little time: Anthropological Approaches to Catastrophe and the Future


Diverse corners of the scientific community have given a deadline on the planet’s ability to sustain life if contemporary modes of production continue as they are. Early predictions of climate disaster now constitute a catastrophic present for millions across the globe. Forecasts of future apocalypse may obscure the extent to which we have already arrived at an “apocalypse now.” For communities surviving beyond traumas of genocidal violence or war, such forecasts may minimize the catastrophes of their own “apocalypse then.” This panel considers how discourses of catastrophe intersect with discourses of the Future to organize, rationalize, advance, or hinder social and political projects across ethnographic contexts. What is the work that predictions of catastrophe do in the present? How does the prospect of catastrophe provoke action, cement paralysis, or invite resignation, cynical or otherwise?


Topics may include:


PERFORMATIVE FUTURES: Prediction, premonition, promise, threat, command all anchor future events to speech acts of the present. How do these performative modes of social action unfold and intervene within projects oriented to catastrophe? What can attending to the performative nature of interventions for the future tell us?


FUTURE GENERATIONS:  The future may be framed as an inevitability of both the life cycle and intergenerational reproduction, yet neither old age nor humanity’s survival seem inevitable in a world undergoing environmental collapse. Social and political aspirations are widely laminated on to generational cohorts, yet we might consider the burden placed across generations, the “hope” placed upon youth to save our collective future. How can practices of queer kinship and interspecies kin making inform our discussions of “future generations”?


INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS: Throughout the Americas native writers, film makers, and artists have elaborated an aesthetic Grace Dillon (2012) has called Indigenous Futurism. Indigenous Futurisms have elaborated imaginings of the unsettling of settler colonialism in the arts. This panel invites ethnographic accounts of Indigenous Futurist aesthetics within native political and cultural life.


This panel invites papers addressing these topics and others, including and not limited to: afrofuturism; refugees, displacement, diaspora; technoscience and catastrophe; algorithms, finance, crisis; interrupted plans and the unexpected; utopia and dystopia.


If interested, send a 250 word abstract to karl.swinehart at louisville.edu



Karl Swinehart
Assistant Professor of Comparative Humanities
University of Louisville
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