Unruliness in a Changing World: Subjectivities and Political Possibilities for Change

Understanding how uncertainty is shaping the future is a core concern of climate scientists, planners and development specialists across a wide variety of disciplines. But what if our efforts to pin down uncertainty are leading us astray? What if planning and prediction create new kinds of uncertainties that make it more difficult, not less, to govern the future let alone the present? In this talk, I draw from feminist and anti-colonial thinking to suggest an emancipatory approach to questions of uncertainty, unruliness and governing the future. I build from the excellent precedents in Sociology and related fields on risk and uncertainty to take on the challenge of chaos: uncertainty that escapes the confines of risk analysis which I call ‘unruliness’. Using empirical examples from energy transition debates in Nepal, I focus this talk on how subjectivities and inequalities become foundational to the way that unruliness can derail the most well-intentioned efforts to prepare for a changing future. These new inequalities are often rooted in gender, race and class, but exposure and vulnerability to biophysical hazards adds another intersectional dimension. I outline a relational framing of change that emphasises an anti-colonial, political, cross-scalar, and socionatural analysis in order to ask, how do political struggles over how to govern the future transform possibilities for solidarity in the present?