The global climate and environmental crises we are verging on calls for a more urgent understanding of the future as NOW! The Covid-19 pandemic destabilized future anticipations; prompted instant dystopias, but also gave rise to utopias of more social and caring communities of constant hugging. Our anticipations to the future matter a great deal for how we inhabit the present. In everyday life we may also practice micro-utopias of hope, transition, and viable futures. However, in everyday life distant futures reaching beyond one’s own lifetime may compete with near future and immediate present and create dilemmas and affective ambivalence. Distinct affects of fear, hope, guilt, and care may materialize in mundane objects and activities such as plastic or recycling and may entangle with the vernacular notions of a future of climate change. Despite the strong incitements for practising more viable futures this pursuit often collides with competing temporalities of everyday life such as the pressed schedules by work, the urgent needs of the here-and-now and daily routines turned into second nature.
In my presentation I will discuss how within STS one may engage with affective dimensions of everyday practices? I will address this discussion through my investigation of affective and ambivalent practices of caring for the future in everyday life by ethnographic ‘snapshots’ on 1) the new ways past, present and future became entangled in a state of exception (the pandemic lockdowns) and 2) how the care for more viable futures can shape everyday practices of eating and of sorting waste. My examples are taken from an empirical material consisting of 36 ethnological student diaries written on one day in March 2020 or 2021, and 35 diaries from March 2022 or 2023.
Tine Damsholt is a professor in European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. Her primary fields of research are everyday life and political culture i.e., material-discursive practices in contemporary and in 18th and 19th century Denmark. She has managed several ethnographic research projects on everyday practices in contemporary Denmark. Practice, performativity, subjectivity, materiality, discourses, temporality, emotions and affects, landscape, bodily movement, and gender are recurrent themes in her research and publications. Currently she is investigating transformations of competing everyday temporalities (e.g., entanglements of pasts, presents, and futures), including ambivalences within quotidian practicing of sustainable futures. You can read more about Tine here: Tine Damsholt - Ansatte på Saxo-Instituttet (ku.dk)