182 Future-Politics: Ethics and Eschatology

Resurrecting the Future: Critical Perspectives on the Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics
Sunday, March 16, 2014: 11:00 AM-12:45 PM
Chairman's (Omni Shoreham)
Each of the papers in this session are connected by their central focus on the embodied European eschatologies underlying the notion that present-day action has some bearing on future salvation. These heavily moralized “future-projects” are deeply entangled with kin relations, sexual reproduction, social welfare and responsibility, the after-life, and the lives of others to come. Papers explore these entanglements in the Orthodox and evangelical Christian dimensions of postsocialist transition in Russia, in the moral transformation of Romani communities in Bulgaria, among family-based firms in the Italian heritage-food industry, in the unintended consequences of Sweden’s Artificial Insemination Law, and in the “miraculous return” of Iceland’s future after the recent financial and political crisis.
Chair:
Sarah Bakker
Discussant:
Sarah Bakker
On Being Ahead: Missives from a Future Already Arrived
Alix Johnson, University of California - Santa Cruz
The Tense Present: Constructing Economic Futures Through Family-Based Production
Jillian R. Cavanaugh, Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center CUNY