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The modern promise of progress opened up the future: it turned it a source of aspiration and possibility, an untapped reservoir, an irresistible infatuation. For over two hundred years, the future was modernity’s call and its consolation, its clarion call and its lullaby. But, after progress, the future is not what it used to be. Given over to the contingencies and upheavals of an earth at loose ends with itself, the future has been rendered precarious when not marked by the threat of catastrophe. 

What might it take to dare give up the future in order to give ourselves over to its outside, to other planetary rhythms of urban life? 

Reprising the impulses and motifs of Gordon Matta-Clark’s experiment in “anarchitecture” and his aesthetics of collapse, as well as much of what I’ve learned from the exceptional work of the Urban Institute, this talk makes a case for accompanying the ongoing collective unrest that is the elaboration of urban social life for now, in the planetary mess that is the present tense. Experimenting with the question of the future and its outside in the urban planetary present, I probe the potential of a theory of social change after progress, one capable not of building a future but of elaborating infrastructures of sociality out of bounds.

Biography

 is Reader in Social and Environmental Thought.

He is a social theorist, sociologist, and philosopher with a focus on planetary instability, climate change, and socio environmental transformations.

His transdisciplinary work draws inspiration from philosophy, the environmental humanities, global social theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and the environmental social sciences, to develop transformative theoretical frameworks and analyses to understand our planetary condition. 

His work explores how global histories of modernity have come to shape the nature of social and planetary challenges, and how peoples (human and more) exposed to climate vulnerabilities craft tenacious and pluriversal futures amidst environmental instability.     

He is the author of (Duke University Press, 2021) and (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, with a foreword by Isabelle Stengers). He is co-editor of  (Sage, 2022) and  (Routledge, 2017). He has co-curated the  in Collaborative Storytelling, and has published essays and special issues in world-leading journals, including Theory, Culture & Society; The Sociological Review; Sub-Stance:A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism; Social Text; Dialogues in Human Geography: and Culture, Theory & Critique, among others.

• When:  Wednesday 25th June, 1730-1900

• Where: Diamond Lecture Room 5, Sheffield University

• How: Hybrid

• Participants: Open to Public

• How to register: . Registration closes Friday 20th June. 

• Find out more: UI Associate/School of Architecture and Landscape, Tanzil Shafique, t.i.shafique@sheffield.ac.uk