Vortrag von Alexandra Schwell: „Mobilizing Urgency, Mobilizing Futures“ beim Futures Talk in Zagreb

Auf Einladung des Forschungsprojekts „Urban Futures: Imagining and Activating Possibilities in Unsettled Times“ (https://www.citymaking.eu/en/) hält Alexandra Schwell einen Vortrag zum Thema „Mobilizing Urgency, Mobilizing Future“.

17. September 2021, 11 Uhr am Institut für Ethnologie und Volkskunde in Zagreb sowie auf ZOOM.

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 paper, thus, is twofold: to understand how urgency functions as a tool of mobilization in general and to explore its anti-democratic potential in particular.