Langugae SWITCH
Poziv na predavanje dr. sc. Felixa Ringela
Srijeda, 19. ožujka 2025. u 10 sati
Vijećnica Filozofskog fakulteta Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
S velikim zadovoljstvom pozivamo vas na javno predavanje izv. prof. dr. sc. Felixa Ringela (Sveučilište Durham, UK) koje će se održati u sklopu projekta Transformacija postindustrijskog grada: prostor, zajednica i rad (PostCity) Hrvatske zaklade za znanost.
Ethnographies of Postindustrial Futures: Shrinkage, Sustainability and Temporal Agency in the Late Capitalist City
Since the future arguably does not exist (yet), it constitutes quite a tricky object of study. However, any social science must still account for the fact that futures are everywhere. Indeed, in the contemporary late-capitalist era, references to and imaginations of the future abound, as crisis after crisis put into question what we individually and collectively can expect. As I argue in this talk, the social sciences have for too long disregarded the future and approached the present(s) they study with a perspective from the past. Based on long-term fieldwork in postindustrial European cities, I propose a different approach: presentism. This approach is shaped by my own discipline’s methods of fieldwork and participant observation. For a social anthropologists, the aim is to take relations to the future seriously, showing how the yet-to-come affects the present. In the context of my two fieldsites, I explore two different ways in which imagined and emerging futures determine people’s prospects and everyday lives. I show how in Hoyerswerda, Germany’s fastest shrinking city, its citizenry has come to terms with the loss of its future, overcoming the logic of postindustrial shrinkage and decline. My interlocutors from Bremerhaven, in turn, have set their hopes on urban sustainability. Despite its many shortcomings, sustainability remains a useful concept for the development and implementation of late-capitalist futures as it pushes the boundaries of temporal thought from imagining change to maintaining that change in the future. With humanity’s fate at stake, this is how far temporal imagination will have to reach.
O autoru
Dr. sc. Felix Ringel je izvanredni profesor na Odsjeku za antropologiju Sveučilišta Durham u Ujedinjenom Kraljevstvu. Njegova područja interesa su vrijeme, održivost i urbani razvoj u postindustrijskoj Europi. U svojoj prvoj knjizi Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest-Shrinking City (2018) istražio je učinke velike depopulacije u njemačkom gradu Hoyerswerda, kako su se stanovnici “grada bez budućnosti“ nosili s takvom etiketom i na koje su načine ”vraćali” svoje budućnosti u svoje ruke. Trenutačno radi na drugoj knjizi After Sustainability: An Anthropological Investigation of a ‘Climate City’ in Crisis u kojoj je fokus na pokušajima Bremerhavena, još jednog njemačkog postindustrijskog grada, da osigura održivost nakon nedavnog zastoja u prijelazu na obnovljive izvore energije u Njemačkoj.
