In our second URBAN FUTURES talk, we will host dr. Alexandra Schwell. She is a professor of empirical cultural analysis at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Research interests include the anthropology of the political, (in)security, state and nation, popular culture, border studies, ethnographic methods, and Europeanization processes. She is co-convenor of the EASA “Anthropology of Security Network” and co-editor-in-chief of “Ethnologia Europaea – Journal of European Ethnology”.
Urgency seems to lie at the heart of both the climate change issue and right-wing populist politics. In both domains, it functions as a driving force, as a discursive and emotional practice employed to underline the issue’s relevance and timeliness. To invoke urgency and generate a sense of urgency is meant to evoke this same feeling in other actors – the feeling that ‘something needs to be done, now!’ As such, urgency is a crucial element of processes of securitisation. Urgency as a mobilizing force is strongly intertwined with imaginations about possible futures that relate to it. The invocation of urgency creates a time span between the present emergency and the on-rushing future characterised by ambivalence and insecurity. The goal of this talk, thus, is twofold: to understand how urgency functions as a tool of mobilization in general and to explore its anti-democratic potential in particular.
Join our talk on Mobilizing Urgency, Mobilizing Futures on Friday, September 17, 2021, at 11 AM on Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84843343641?pwd=WGt1bzFrSG9OSVR3aFRWUGowWUl4QT09
Meeting ID: 848 4334 3641
Passcode: 798043