School of Social and Political Science

Description

Conference Theme
Future-making is an embodied social, cultural and political practice (Appadurai 2013). Anchored in the present, futures are the ground for struggles and debates. In contemporary contexts of violent conflict, powerful actors use narratives of security, peace and development to justify politics of the future that often not only shatter the future hopes of others but are also realized at the expense of the freedom, security and fundamental rights of less powerful actors (Hage 2016; Willow 2020). While insecurity and violence limit the possibilities of a peaceful and just future for all, they also inspire refusal and resistance, enabling marginalized and oppressed people and groups to imagine and invent new forms of belonging and living together beyond the political order of the nation-state and its violent boundaries. It is this paradoxical entanglement of “fearful anticipation” (Das 2007, 98) and hopeful striving for something new and largely unknown that makes conditions of conflict and violence an important ethnographic source to explore how alternative politics of the future emerge in the present and from positions and places of marginality and relative powerlessness.
In social movements, political activism and everyday life, people and groups engage in “prefigurative politics” (Graeber 2009) in a variety of ways. By linking present practices to imagined and desired futures, these politics provide laboratories for future-making that turn oppressive conditions into transformative processes. This ongoing work of planting and growing alternatives takes place in the margins and cracks of the colonial, capitalist and heteropatriarchal social and political order of our times.
The conference explores diverse and contested forms of future-making in times of conflict, violence and insecurity. It includes nine panels, a keynote speech, a film screening and a creative workshop on topics such as:
- Future-making “from below”, including grassroot, NGO and other civil society initiatives that engage in re-making, re-imagining and re-enacting futures from marginalized and oppressed positions and places.
- Exclusionary and violent future-making practices and their contestation.
- Prefigurative politics and other ways of practicing and embodying desired futures in political activism and everyday life.
- Creating and nurturing radical hopes in times of conflict and violence.
- Everyday practices of peace and building bridges across social and political divides and lines of conflict and (radical) disagreement.
- Power relations and the ways gender, race, class, ethnicity etc. shape practices, politics and possibilities of future-making.
- Possibilities for and practices of a future/prefigurative anthropology of peace, conflict and security.
- Temporalities and spaces of future-making.

FULL PROGRAMME IS AVAILABLE BELOW:

Final APeCS_Programme 2025.pdf