Queer Temporalities of Crisis: Utopian, Dystopian, and Alternative Futures

Contemporary societies appear increasingly organised around competing visions of the future. While some imagine ecological collapse, authoritarianism, economic breakdown, and social fragmentation, others continue to invest in promises of technological progress and social resilience, as well as multiple "retrotopias". Between hope and despair, however, lies a broader field of temporal imagination through which people make sense of uncertainty, organise political action, and negotiate everyday life. This session invites contributions that explore the temporalities of crisis from queer sociological perspectives. Mindful of the turn to affects in sociology, we are interested in how futures are anticipated, feared, desired, resisted, and inhabited across diverse social contexts. Building on traditions of utopian sociology, queer futurity, anti-futurity, dystopian critique, and sociology of time, the session asks how contemporary crises reshape our relationships to the future and to one another.

We welcome papers examining the role of hope, doom, fear, survival, resilience, care, and imagination in shaping collective life. How do queer communities navigate conditions of polycrisis, ecological uncertainty, democratic decline, restrained migration, war, or rising anti-gender politics? What forms of knowledge emerge from dystopian expectations, utopian desires, or alternative temporal orientations? How are futures governed through transformed social institutions? And how might queer perspectives challenge dominant assumptions about progress and/or decline? The session welcomes theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions from scholars working across various topics.