Politics at the end of the world: an IPS workshop
Picture: Daniel Olah (OlTjeydUpQw-unsplash)
When: 25 October 2024, 10:30-16:30.
Where: Queen Mary University of London, Room: Peter Landin PL-401
Co-organised by: Queen Mary Research Group on International Political Sociology and Angharad Closs Stephens (Swansea University), Visiting Researcher at Queen Mary.
This workshop invites reflection on the political implications of ‘end-of-the-world’ narratives, statements and imagery in terms of how they inform and potentially impede political action. We want to ask: how can we imagine the present and future otherwise without negating the very urgent global challenges that we face? Building on a previous IPS event, on Navigating Catastrophic Times , which asked how end-thinking can politicise and activate, this workshop seeks to unpack the different forms that ideas about the apocalypse take and how these tie to broader and longstanding ideas about modern life. Overall, we will bring together scholars to remind us of other apocalyptic imaginaries from the recent and distant past, and consider the possibilities for unfolding alternative understandings of where we stand and where we are headed.
Programme
10:00-10:30: Arrival
10:30-10:45: Welcome
10:45-11:45: Angharad Closs Stephens “Crisis and the end-of-the-world: navigating the affective politics of climate change.” [Chair: Jef Huysmans]
This presentation addresses the current predominance of ‘end-of-the-world’ narratives, and some of the implications when this translates into political activism. The presentation explores this in relation to the claim that we collectively fail to respond to climate change. Bringing together the work of Lauren Berlant, Ghassan Hage, Bruno Latour and Dipesh Chakrabarty, it addresses ecological crises through the affective everyday register of how people go about making their lives viable, to develop new entry points to the question of what it means to act politically. The presentation argues for an affective approach to climate and racial justice that reconsiders what it means to act politically.
12:00-13:00: Debbie Lisle and Martin Coward “Hopeless failure: belatedness, refusal and the arts of living.” [Chair: Joao P. Nogueira]
This presentation theorises the temporal politics of failure against a background of global collapse. Our present seems to be marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst this wreckage, we see numerous attempts – real and imagined – to keep hope alive by learning from failure. Failure, here, is understood as the recognition that a desired outcome has not been achieved but with the appropriate analysis, learning and hard work, that desire remains a possibility. This presentation starts from the position that it is already too late for such desires and turns our attention instead to the potentialities of an elongated present – what Tsing (2015) calls the ‘arts of living in capitalist ruins’. ‘Arts of living’ that refuse the futural logic of hopeful failure endure below the threshold of transformative change. Such practices generate new political terrains in an era when it is already too late for hopeful dreams of progress.
13:00-14:00: Lunch
14:00-15:45: Roundtable “How to think the catastrophic non-catastrophically?” [Chair: Jef Huysmans]
Speakers: Catherine Nash, Joanne Yao, Jami Abramson, Bethan Hier, Joao P. Nogueira
The roundtable explores analytics of co-existence that allow for thinking politics in catastrophic times without grounding it in existential anxieties and finitude. Does political action to address climate change or the risks of new pandemics require the mobilisation of existential fears? Is the problem today that we are not sufficiently afraid of the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, ecological collapse, or the eradication of the human species? But what are the implications of political organisation through the mobilisation of anxiety and by enacting life and matter from the point of view of existential endings? The roundtable reflects on these questions from various social science approaches that are sceptical about existentialising politics.
16:00-16:30: Concluding discussion: What about the politics of continuing worlds? [Chair: Angharad Closs Stephens]