Future, Crisis, and Political Action In Turbulent Times

Our session invites contributions discussing how imaginaries, practices, and affections towards the future are produced, disputed, and transformed in times of crises. Particularly, it welcomes contributions attentive to the dimension of political action, in which the future appears not only as a contested arena but also as a resource for collective mobilisation. The significance of these questions becomes especially apparent in contexts marked by turbulence and social transformation. While “crisis” remains a disputed concept within the social sciences, there seems to be no doubt that our present moment is one of multiple, overlapping crises. Against this backdrop, the relationship between temporalities, crisis interpretations, and action emerges as a particularly important field of inquiry. How have different political actors navigated these times, and what rationalities inform their practices within this context? What kinds of futures become imaginable, possible, or attainable in periods such as the one we inhabit today? To what extent do turbulent times condition social and political action, and how do actors relate to the future amid these transformations? How are futurities accelerated, delayed, maintained, abandoned, opened, and foreclosed? These are some of the questions that inspire the present session. It follows the hypothesis that a qualitative differentiation between moments of crisis and non-crisis fundamentally changes political action and its relationship to the future. We welcome contributions from different fields of research that address these and further related questions, both empirically and theoretically, across different social, institutional, and geographical contexts.