Future/tense: A sociology of temporal dis/order

Abstract

The last few years of pandemic living have highlighted various temporal tensions that characterise our individual and collective futures. In some ways, the scale of temporal disruption caused by the pandemic could be considered unprecedented. But in other ways, the temporal tensions that underpin social life are long-standing, even routine. In this special issue, ‘Future/Tense: A Sociology of Temporal Dis/Order’, we take the intensification of temporal tensions in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, and well beyond it, as impetus to interrogate how the future is variously known, felt and valued by individuals, institutions and societies. The assembled articles cover a wide range of empirical foci – from life-limiting diagnoses and housing instability to climate anxiety and space colonisation. They are united, however, by their critical attention to the (frequently overlooked) temporal tensions that lie at the heart of many of the key social challenges we confront in the contemporary historical moment.

The future has long been an important focus of social theory. From the utopian revolutionary futures imagined in early Marxist thought to the multitude of future-oriented mundane actions that constitute day-to-day living, how the future is known, felt and valued is central to the social life of individuals, institutions and societies (e.g. Adam, 2005; Adkins, 2017; Beckert & Suckert, 2021; Coleman, 2017; Engels & Marx, 2012; Halford & Southerton, 2023; Nowotny, 2018; Rose, 2001; Sewell, 2008). Yet the future remains wildly intractable – hard to know, hard to control and deeply contingent upon forces beyond our control, across scales from the less-than to the much-more-than human. The wide variety of empirical foci in the articles assembled here attests to the felt presence of the future across almost every domain of social life.

In this special issue of The Journal of Sociology, we take various social tensions the COVID-19 pandemic brought out of the cultural shadows as impetus to centre the future as a key orientation for contemporary sociological scholarship. Mobilising attention to the different forms of temporal dis/order that have become intensified in recent years, we seek to develop a more explicit understanding of how the future features prominently, if often subtly, across all aspects of social life.

In naming this special issue ‘Future/Tense: A Sociology of Temporal Dis/Order’, we refer to the troubles and tensions that the future can bring forth. We also evoke the ways the future can both structure and dissolve our individual and collective hopes, fears and plans for what might happen to us, and the world, tomorrow, next year and/or for generations to come. Additionally, we bring to the fore of analysis the ways that both hope and fear surrounding the future can limit – or, indeed, be deployed to limit – our imaginaries in the present, including our individual and collective capacity to conceive of alternative and emancipatory futures, beyond various capitalist, colonialist and heteronormative pasts.

We are fortunate to include contributions from authors across Australia, the UK, Europe and China that address topics ranging from the seemingly mundane day-to-day activities of living during the pandemic, to questions of mortality, mobility, climate collapse and space colonisation. The contributions are united by their critical attention to the (frequently overlooked) temporal tensions that lie at the heart of many of the key social challenges we confront in the contemporary historical moment.

Pandemic (of) uncertainties

Uncertainties regarding the future have recently been amplified due, in large part, to the conditions of pandemic living over the last five years. In the early days of the pandemic, the most pressing concern was perhaps the immediate threat of the microbial to the human. What was this new viral threat? How ‘big’ a problem might it be? And at what scale might it unravel the status quo of anthropocentric dominance – for example, at the microbial, local, national, international or planetary level?

As this new virus spread, even the most proximal forms of future-oriented activity – the micro-level actions and interactions that constitute daily living – were rendered uncertain, undoable, impractical. Indeed, Dr Nancy Messonnier, then-head of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned early on that managing the emerging COVID-19 outbreak might involve community measure ranging from masking and physical distancing to school and work closures and the cancellation of mass gatherings. As she cautioned on 20 February 2020 during the daily telebriefing on the CDC's nascent COVID-19 response:

I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need to start thinking about now … You should ask your children's school about their plans for school dismissals or school closures … You should think about what you would do for childcare if schools or day cares close. If teleworking is an option for you. All of these questions can help you be better prepared for what might happen. (Stein & Walmsley, 2020)

What might happen was both increasingly urgent and, simultaneously, uncertain – only partially and imperfectly decipherable by our predictive models and modes of comprehension. Yet the normative imperative persisted – that each of us should be undertaking various forms of future-oriented actions, nonetheless, was clear.

As the pandemic progressed and various local and national restrictions were rolled out, different temporal horizons came into view. But these often entailed similar levels of uncertainty. For those who experienced long periods of stay-at-home orders, restrictions on moving and gathering, or other varieties of ‘lock down’, uncertainty as to when it might end inflected almost every aspect of living. For many, their relations to family, acquaintances and public authorities became increasingly uncertain (e.g. Radhuber et al., 2023, 2024). Relatedly, the timing of many ‘milestones’ was called into question or made newly fraught: family holidays, school graduations, overseas travel, births, marriages, divorces, funerals, elective medical procedures and even the Olympics were variously cancelled, reconfigured, brought forward or postponed.

With the majority of COVID-related restrictions now behind us, the temporal experience of the pandemic years is still dis/orientating. The pandemic cleaved a deep if contested demarcation between the ‘before’ times and the ‘after’. ‘Before COVID’, ‘during lockdown’ and ‘when lockdown lifted’ are near-universal markers around which many of us now orient with respect to the last few years, to our children's or grandchildren's early lives, to the final moments we shared (or were denied) with those who died, and so on. Within this demarcation between the ‘before’ and ‘after’ remains the temporal space in between, cut through with an enduring sense of dis/orientation.

Anticipation

Although it is well established that various types of trauma can disrupt one's experience of time (Holman & Grisham, 2020), the scale of this collective disruption during the pandemic could be seen as unprecedented in the living memory of most people. But in some ways, many of the temporal dynamics were routine. The uncertainty of the future and the necessity of action in the present despite it was amplified during pandemic living, for sure. But this simultaneous uncertainty and imperative to act is often a feature of day-to-day life more generally. At play in both instantiations – in this space of planning, acting and living in the face of uncertainty – is the work of anticipation. Often characterised as pertaining to individuals, anticipation has been usefully theorised as a characteristic of late modern living – as simultaneously an ethic, a politics and an affective orientation. A full decade before the pandemic, Adams et al. (2009) wrote of anticipation as

[the] palpable effect of the speculative future on the present … a way of actively orienting oneself temporally … [and as] a regime of being in time in which one inhabits time out of place as the future … that may or may not be known for certain, but still must be acted on nonetheless (p. 247).

As they go on to explain:

While it is not new, anticipation is intensifying into a hegemonic formation, thereby raising the stakes for analysis along temporal, epistemological and affective logics … Anticipatory regimes offer a future that may or may not arrive, is always uncertain and yet is necessarily coming and so therefore always demanding a response … it is a moral economy in which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present … entail[ing] a forced passage through affect, in the sense that the anticipatory regime cannot generate its outcomes without arousing a ‘sense’ of the simultaneous uncertainty and inevitability of the future, usually manifest as entanglements of fear and hope (p. 249, emphases added)

Anticipation, as imagined by Adams et al., captures some of the key dynamics theorised by the numerous scholars who have addressed the future within sociology (e.g. Adam, 1994, 2010; Bell, 1996; Brown & Michael, 2003; Coleman & Tutton, 2017; Oomen et al., 2022; Tutton, 2017; Urry, 2016) and adjacent disciplines (e.g. Anderson, 2009, 2010; Berlant, 2011). This conceptualisation of anticipation as a hegemonic form – one that imputes a particular moral economy and affective orientation and inspires entanglements of fear and hope, or, put differently, gives rise to multiple, ambivalent or even contradictory visions of the future – resonates in various ways across the articles contained within this special issue.

Central, here, is the notion of anticipation as a hegemonic formation. As Adams et al. (2009) detail, anticipatory regimes, much like capitalism, depend on continual expansion (pp. 250–251). Just as market forces and economising logics have steadily crept into domains and institutions once outside their reach – welfare provision, education, health and social care, for example – anticipatory regimes can be seen to increasingly govern across the lifecycle. Thus anticipation results in a telescoping of temporality, simultaneously reaching backwards to pre-conception planning and the management of (for instance) genetic risk, and forwards to the advanced management of our own (future) mortality – cast now, not as an inevitability outside our control, but as something requiring forms of preparation and care that can be strategically managed in the present (see Zivkovic & Marino, 2024).

In certain respects, the pandemic suspended our ability to anticipate all together. Some scholars have seen this as a forestalling of the future and, as a result, a slowing or suspension of the usual relentless progression or even acceleration of time. Lisa Suckert (2021) argues that in this sense, COVID-19 was not only a medical threat, but also a threat to the ‘temporal logic inherent to capitalism’ – one that requires both constant expansion and constant acceleration (p. 1162). But others have argued that, long before the pandemic, the logic of neoliberal capitalism had already not so much forestalled the future as foreclosed it (Adkins et al., 2023). As a result, futurity itself has become distributed unevenly across and within societies.

In economies that are increasingly predicated on asset ownership (e.g. across the Global North), unequal futures are now found among those who are ‘locked into and locked out of’ (Adkins et al., 2023, p. 349) asset ownership. Viewed through the lens of the asset economy, pandemic measures – geared largely towards keeping property-owning households (and their mortgaged assets) afloat in service of future opportunities for wealth accumulation – were not at odds with temporal logics of capitalism so much as furthering to entrenching them. The temporality of asset-based capitalism thus cuts two distinct paths, towards ‘futures filled with the prospect of capital gains, further investments and inter-generational transfers of wealth’ for asset holders, ‘while leaving non-asset holders to tread water in a precarious and seemingly never-ending now’ (Adkins et al., 2023, p. 360). The foreclosed futures of those marginalised by asset-based capitalism can thus be viewed as a kind of ‘de-futuring violence’, not dissimilar to the anti-Black, colonial, ableist and domestic violence, and conditions of economic precarity, that pandemic measures also exacerbated in deep if also subtle ways (Grove et al., 2021. See also Plage et al. (2024) and Morgan & Tutton (2024) in this special issue).

The hegemony of anticipatory regimes imputes a similarly pervasive moral economy of anticipatory action. The most pressing moral injunction of anticipation, Adams et al. (2009) argue, is the familiar biopolitical imperative of self-optimisation (p. 256). Foucault long ago identified that fundamental shift in the nature of power that emerged in the 18th century from the sovereign right to take life to the biopolitical imperative to make live through the administration and optimisation of the vital characteristics of populations. Building on this work, Nikolas Rose has identified how health has become a core ethical value of advanced liberal societies. Key to this, Rose (2007) argues, is a shift in the temporal orientation of health. Due in large part to the molecular turn over the second half of the 20th century and the development of novel technologies of risk mitigation and genetic enhancement, there has emerged a distinct ‘forward vision’ that seeks to ‘optimize the vital future by action in the vital present’ (Rose, 2007, p. 8). Not only are subjects enjoined to optimise their own health in the present, but they are also charged to optimise their future health as a moral responsibility. Rose (2007) – and Adams et al. (2009, p. 256) following him – thus views optimisation as the ‘moral responsibility of citizens to secure their best possible futures’.

Although biopolitics might be an archetypal example, here the moral economy of optimisation far exceeds it (see also Krupar & Ehlers, 2020). State biopolitical strategies such as lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates were prominent features of the pandemic. But so too were more subtle injunctions towards optimisation across other domains of living. Who among us escaped targeted advertising or media pieces inviting us to use lockdown as an ‘opportunity’ to better ourselves in one way or another – to get in shape, lose weight, cook ‘from scratch’, learn a new language, take up a new hobby, start a ‘side hustle’, begin a meditation practice? Even in the suspended present of pandemic living, calls to self-optimise were pervasive. However, much like the uneven distribution of futurity itself discussed above, optimisation operates as a universal imperative across a highly unequal moral economy of individualised agency. Certain (privileged) subjects are positioned for success whereas others are positioned as the failed subjects of a biopolitics of ‘lifestyle’ that fails to attend to the structural dynamics that profoundly shape people's ability to optimise not only their own health, but their own futures writ large (see Tien et al., 2024).

Adams et al. argue that in its operation as a moral economy, anticipation ‘forces passage through affect’ in a way that often manifests as ‘entanglements of fear and hope’ (2009, p. 249). In describing this forced passage through affect, they draw on Sara Ahmed's (2004) notion of an affective economy. Affect, Ahmed argues, does not emanate from within individual bodies or from signs or commodities; rather, it is produced through its own circulation. The more affects circulate, the more ‘affective’ they become (Ahmed, 2004, p. 120. See also Olson et al., 2024). As a result, Adams et al. (2009) argue: ‘Anticipation as an affective condition is not simply a matter of the anxieties within individual subjects. Regimes of anticipation are distributed and extensive formations that interpellate, situate, attract and mobilize subjects individually and collectively’ (p. 249).

Distributed anticipation can draw forth widespread anxieties and fear (Hurtado Hurtado, 2024), or alternatively collective hopes (Banham, 2024). But fundamentally, anticipation-as-affect is not just a way of reacting to the world around but a way of ‘orienting oneself temporally’ (Adams et al., 2009, p. 247). Namely, towards the future.

The affects that anticipation can simultaneously call forth – the entanglements of fear and hope that Adams et al. (2009) describe – can, however, remain contradictory. Anticipation need not necessarily entail positive or negative affective orientations. Instead, anticipation might evoke different forms of contradiction, multiplicity and ambivalence. Often equated with indecision between competing options, ambivalence has also been usefully theorised as the experience of contradictory feeling, at the same time. Smelser, for example, defines ambivalence as ‘the simultaneous existence of attraction and repulsion, of love and hate’ (1998, p. 5). Perhaps the most generative take on ambivalence in recent years is the American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant's conceptualisation of ‘cruel optimism’ (2011). Similarly concerned with the difficulties of affectively orienting oneself in the face of an uncertain future, Berlant's analysis highlights the paradoxical condition of the ‘precarious present’ (2011, p. 17) in which people remain attached to visions, fantasies and aspirations that have become (or perhaps always were) fundamentally unattainable or even harmful (see Plage et al., 2024). This kind of prospective attachment is optimistic in that it holds, in the present moment, the promise of a particular future. But it is simultaneously cruel in that the future it promises has become significantly problematic in one way or another. Berlant considers what happens in the ‘precarious present’ to be characterised by the ‘fraying of the fantasy of the “good life” specifically attached to labor, the family wage and upward mobility’ when the affective language of ‘anxiety, continency and precarity … take up the space that sacrifice, upwards mobility and meritocracy used to occupy’ (2011, p. 19). Berlant goes on to ask:

What happens to optimism when futurity splinters as a prop for getting through life? What happens when an older ambivalence about security (the Weberian prison of disenchanted labor) meets a newer detachment from it (everything is contingent)? How does one understand the emergence of this as an objective and sensed crisis?

If anticipation as characterised by Adams et al. names the affective push towards action under conditions of uncertainty and precarity, Berlant's conceptualisation of cruel optimism names the affective pulls that optimistic visions of futures-past still exert on the present. Yet this is often both to the detriment of those living in the current moment and to the detriment of possible alternative futures, too. Throughout the articles contained within this special issue, both the affective push of conditions of precarity and the affective pull of (sometimes cruelly) optimistic futures amidst those conditions of precarity are evident.

Structure and contents of future/tense

Across a wide range of empirical contexts, the articles gathered here speak to different dimensions of ‘the future’, and how it is variously anticipated, including: (a) anticipating different forms of precarity of the future; (b) negotiating ambivalence in the face of the future; (c) the work of anticipating and caring for the future; and (d) the multiplicity of the future. We say a little bit more about each and offer some concluding thoughts, below.

Anticipating the (precarious) future

Precarity and uncertainty are key themes both in sociologies of the future and across the articles contained in this special issue. In particular, the papers by Williams Veazey et al. (2024), Plage et al. (2024) and Olson et al. (2024) explore how people make sense of, and respond to, precarious futures. The papers by Plage et al. (2024) and Olson et al. (2024) both investigate contemporary crises in Australian society – housing and climate change – and the precarious futures that appear to loom large in the contemporary Australian imaginary. By contrast, Williams Veazey et al. (2024) explore the embodied precarity precipitated by a cancer diagnosis, and how futures are imagined, assembled or forestalled in relation to im/mobility. Each paper in this section considers how ‘imaginaries, expectations and narratives of the future’ (Bazzani, 2023) guide our understanding of the different types of future embedded in the present.

Climate change and environmental futures feature heavily in popular and scholarly discourses of the future and futurelessness (Tutton, 2023; Urry, 2008). In their paper, Olson et al. (2024) draw on a multi-method qualitative text and discourse analysis of Australian news articles published in 2022 reporting on emotions related to the ecological present and future. Focusing on the notion of eco-anxiety or climate anxiety, the authors’ analysis shows the circulation of feelings of despair as Australians face an ‘anxious present about an uncertain future’. The authors trace three key emotional registers deployed in news articles on climate change: emotions as an understandable response to climate change; emotions as extreme, unwelcome and even hysterical; and climate anxiety as a risk to mental health and/or a resource for fuelling action. The authors argue for the necessity of ‘collective forms of emotional agency’ for effective action to tackle climate change.

Orientations to the future are neither uniform nor universal (see e.g. Atkinson, 2013 on classed perceptions of the future). In their paper, Plage et al. (2024) examine how people experiencing housing instability anticipate their future amidst the (cruelly optimistic) dual conditions of an enduring ‘Australian dream’ of home ownership and an ongoing Australian housing crisis that, for many, has foreclosed the option of secure housing. Building on the concept of anticipation as a governing logic, the authors explore how people experiencing housing instability are expected to prepare for the consequences of anticipated housing risks – to ‘optimise’ their own housing futures. Drawing on participant observation, interviews and participant-produced photographs, the paper examines the hopes of these Australians experiencing housing instability, and the constraints they face in realising them. In the absence of secure housing, participants anticipated future risks by making themselves ‘housing ready’, demonstrating their moral ‘worthiness’ by completing housing applications and working on other goals. Despite the overwhelming sense of insecurity and liminality (‘stalling’), there is, in the authors’ words, ‘no time to waste.’

The cultural imperative to use time well – the ‘imperative of optimisation’ (Plage & Kirby, 2021, p. 96) – is brought into sharp relief by unexpected constraints and sudden onset precarity, whether in the form of a life-limiting diagnosis or pandemic-related restrictions on mobility. The paper by Williams Veazey et al. (2024) examines how diagnosis with a life-limiting illness fundamentally reshapes an individual's or family's relationship with the future. Through an examination of the popular notion of the ‘bucket list’, in particular, the authors explore how futures are imagined, assembled or forestalled in relation to im/mobility. Drawing together scholarship on prognosis and mortality (Jain, 2013; Knox, 2020) with literature on the meanings of travel, mobility and immobility (Salazar, 2021; White & White, 2004) the authors explore spatio-temporal dimensions of individual and relational futures. Planning, dreaming or actualising movement between places may bring a sense that one is ‘going somewhere’ in life (Hage, 2009; Salazar, 2021). Indeed, as Plage et al. (2024) note in their paper in this section, research participants experiencing housing instability used metaphors and similes referencing forwards or upwards movement in their narratives of anticipating (and taking control of) their futures. Conversely, migration and mobility scholars have noted that enforced immobility may come to represent a sense of existential ‘stuckness’ (Stock, 2019; Straughan et al., 2020). When confronted with mortality, travel may come to represent a means of exerting control and autonomy in a landscape of limited future-time.

Negotiating ambivalent futures

Moving from impending individual mortality to future collective mortality, and returning to the topic of environmental futures (or, rather, futurelessness), Hurtado Hurtado (2024) deploys two case studies of socio-political responses to an anticipated future of collective death. Contrasting the cases of Extinction Rebellion and Space Colonisation, Hurtado Hurtado analyses archival and media material by each coalition, focusing on how their actions are underpinned by affective responses to the ‘global polycrisis of unsustainability’. Grounded in this analysis, Hurtado Hurtado argues that Extinction Rebellion – a socio-environmental movement that emerged in 2018 and brought together people to stop the climate and ecological emergency – understand future collective death as a ‘future-in-the-making’ (Adam, 2023); that is, the processes that will lead to this future destruction are already occurring and – crucially – can be (partially) prevented if action is taken in the present. Anticipatory grief, guilt and a sense of shared vulnerability drive Extinction Rebellion's action, alongside an understanding that these affective responses are inseparable from political and societal structures. By contrast, Hurtado Hurtado argues, proponents of Space Colonisation – a heterogenous group including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin ventures, among others – are ‘haunted by catastrophic visions of the failure to innovate’ but their response is driven more by death anxiety than by grief for the future consequences of current actions. Rather than the shared (multispecies) vulnerability assumed by Extinction Rebellion, Space Colonisers offer a (potential) escape only for the (human) elites, via the means of extractive and resource-intensive activities which exacerbate the vulnerabilities of others. These two contrasting approaches to the future both demand strategic preparation in the present, but whereas one deems collective death modifiable (with effort), the other deems it only escapable (albeit only for some).

Although taking a different methodological approach, the paper by Filiz (2024) also uses an affective lens to scrutinise people's ‘narratives of the future’ (Bazzani, 2023). Here, the analysis is grounded in interviews with highly qualified Turkish migrants in Germany. These migrants, Filiz argues, are navigating their futures in the context of an ‘ambivalent atmosphere’ in which their qualifications and skills are highly valued and yet they experience both generalised xenophobia and specific discrimination relating to their national origin and religion. Keeping open the possibility of future mobility (whether back to Turkey or onwards migration elsewhere) is described by Filiz as an ‘affective mechanism’ deployed by the Turkish migrants to help manage the present ambivalence about their lives in Germany. Personal and collective futures appear uncertain, for the Turkish migrants specifically and for German society more broadly. In the face of this present ambivalence and uncertain futures, Filiz's highly skilled migrants deploy their sought-after qualifications and their ‘mobility capital’ (Moret, 2020) to imagine the future as ‘open’. Mobility – whether actual or imagined – is deployed as a means of asserting autonomy and control in the face of uncertain futures (see also Williams Veazey et al., 2024). As is noted to various degrees by Filiz, Hurtado Hurtado, and Williams Veazey and colleagues, managing uncertain futures by mobilising (future) mobility in this way is also a privilege not open to all. Socio-political contexts and structures constrain and shape both futures and imaginative responses to them.

Caring for the future

Care is a latent theme in many of the articles that comprise this special issue: care for ourselves and our loved ones; care for our species and our planet; and care for, about or in the context of the multiple, precarious and/or ambivalent futures we (re)create or forestall through our (careful or careless) actions and inactions. Rebecca Banham's (2024) and Tanya Zivkovic and Simone Marino's (2024) contributions in this special issue are particularly illuminating, here. Focusing, respectively, on the role of forest experiences in the formation and maintenance of self-identity, and on Italian migrant experiences and enactments of futurity, these authors explore how our relationships of care – with people and places, objects and environments – shape our orientation to and relationship with the future. Both papers are notable for the emphasis they place on the forms of reciprocity that often comprise caring relationships – including via forms of interdependence that extend beyond the bounds of the human to include the natural and material world (Peterie & Broom, 2024), with implications for our and others’ futures.

Rebecca Banham's article ‘Tasmanian forests and their people’ offers a poignant exploration of the mutual care that characterises some people's interactions with forests. For Banham (2024), the experience of caring for (and, indeed, being cared for by) a non-human environment can be central to how we understand ourselves and our futures. Humans, Banham notes, ‘do not simply visit forests (and other landscapes), and leave untouched’. Rather, humans ‘do specific things in forests that allow them to comprehend and trust their own identities and the material world around them – that is, to pursue a sense of ontological security’. For Banham, the forest experience – and the forms of human/non-human care that are exchanged in forests – shapes our sense of ourselves-in-time in profound ways. She offers the typology of ‘personal time’, ‘external time’ and ‘ontological time’ to describe experiences of the forest that respectively involve personal memories, including memories from different life stages; engagement with the cycles and seasonality of the forest itself; and ontologically, relationally and ethically grounding understandings of the forest as something that extends far beyond any individual's lifespan. These encounters, Banham posits, inform the self-narratives we construct surrounding our experiences of the past and our anticipated futures. Importantly, they also make visible the mutuality of our relationships with nature and our interdependent futures in ways that can that inspire forms of conservation that simultaneously underwrite our ontological security in the present and safeguard a future we will not personally see.

Zivkovic and Marino (2024) offer a different angle on this theme through their exploration of Italian migrants’ future-making. Considering, in particular, ageing migrants’ plans for their future care needs, the authors show that many Italian migrants resist the neoliberal imperative towards self-responsibilisation (represented, here, in Advanced Care Directives (ACDs)), instead privileging the forms of collective decision-making and familial care they associate with their ethnic identity (Nguyen et al., 2021; Sinclair et al., 2014). The future, from this vantage point, is not an individual project so much as a relational one, in which care is exchanged and paid forward across generations.

Just as Banham underlines the power of nature to afford ontological security via the experience of ontological time, so too do Zivkovic and Marino demonstrate that objects can be ontologically important in future-making efforts – coming to represent much more than their instrumental roles or aesthetic materiality. The primary example they offer, here, is that of a 25-face Italian clock that had been built from scrap metal and debris in World War II Sicily, and was now a treasured heirloom in an Italian migrant couple's Adelaide home. ‘Inseparable from migration trajectories of war and displacement’, Zivkovic and Marino explain, ‘future planning [for this couple] took shape not only in ACDs or an individual imperative to age well, but in the familial inheritance of the clock and the security forged in and beyond the bricks and mortar of their home.’ For this couple, a material object came to embody relational futurity and intergenerational connectedness – giving form to the dreams of intergenerational care and continuity that Zivkovic and Marino's interlocutors harboured, but also revealing the tenuousness of these hopes amid ever-shifting and indeterminate futures.

Multiplicity and the future

The fixity or indeterminacy of the future is a question that has been debated across disciplines for millennia. The future has variously been seen to come about by way of individual ‘free will’, techno-capitalist momentum and aligned ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘innovation’, and various forms of social action and resistance that require we actively consider alternative futures and how they might be materialised. In the discipline of sociology, ‘the future’ is rarely rendered as singular. As Morgan and Tutton (2024) point out in their contribution, the sociological preference for the term ‘futures’ ‘recognises how scholars emphasise that there is no such thing as the future; instead, futures are always multiple, competing, contested, contextualised’. Similarly, van Emmerik et al. (2024) argue in their article that dominant ‘major’ temporal structures coexist with ‘minor’ opportunities for reconceptualisation and reconfiguration that push and unsettle the boundaries of the major in small but meaningful ways. In this way, they show how even ‘the majoritarian stream of linear temporality that reaches straightforward into tomorrow … is always being reworked, from which different futures can unfold’.

Although a rich vein of scholarship on how futures are imagined and materialised has emerged within sociology in recent decades, with attention to the importance of various axes of inequality such as social class (Atkinson, 2013), gender and sexuality (Coleman, 2018) and race and ethnicity (Ehlers, 2023), Morgan and Tutton (2024) highlight how attention to the experiences and perspectives of disabled people, as well as to disability itself, is almost entirely absent from sociological scholarship on futures. Morgan and Tutton thus identify an ableist collective fantasy, where people with any form of impairment are simply excluded from utopian future imaginings. Instead, impairment often serves as an embodied signifier of the breakdown of the future, relegated to dystopian visions alone.

Bringing together scholarship in disability studies and the sociology of futures, Morgan and Tutton (2024) consider how instead of dominant visions of futures free of bodily limitations and disease, we might rather envision futures free from the disabling barriers and forms of oppression that constrain the lives of those living with impairment. Importantly, this shifts the focus of social action from the eugenic project of eliminating bodily impairment to target the social constraints that are disabling to the people living with bodily impairment. This would require recognition of the universality and ubiquity of impairment and dependency as a fundamental component of what it means to be human. Drawing inspiration from AfroFuturism and queer theorists, Morgan and Tutton propose the idea of ‘DisFuturism’. They go on to describe DisFuturism as

rich, playful, provocative, speculative and challenging in turn [and] needed to imagine and work towards a world where disability is accepted as part of the human condition and where disabled people play roles in imagining and shaping the futures of that world.

The contribution by van Emmerik et al. (2024) returns to the conditions of pandemic living and offers an interesting theorisation of how different futures might be imagined and realised through minor temporal adjustments to daily living. They draw on Deleuze and Guatarri's (2000) ideas about ‘the major’ as a standard organising force, in this case in relation to the presumed linearity and unidirectional unfolding of time, and the possibilities afforded by ‘the minor’ developed in relation to it. If the major represents the dominant system, the minor can be thought of as a subsystem, a treatment or modification to the major from within it, that is full of creative potential. ‘Minor time’, they argue,

operates within the larger constraints of major time, but in doing so, changes those very outlines of the major. For example, foregrounding or shifting to a circadian pace may expand or shrink what we generally consider a majoritarian workday, even if it does not displace it completely.

Although not overthrowing the major, minor adjustments function as small acts of resistance, nonetheless.

Van Emmerik et al. (2024) draw on 228 reflections written by people living in Britain and submitted to a ‘Mass Observation’ public archive between August and November 2020 – during the UK's nation-wide lockdown and subsequent regional restrictions. The submissions, which were commissioned by the researchers, invited volunteer participants to reflect on whether and how the pandemic had changed their daily routines and plans, if and how they intended to ‘get back to normal’ and what they thought the future might hold. Through an analysis of these reflections recounting varying degrees of changes to the quotidian routines of daily living, van Emmerick et al. illustrate how minor reclamations of time, which allow greater malleability than majoritarian temporal structures, react back to shape the major nonetheless. For some of these writers, re-establishing temporal relations, rhythms and routines was an important way of anchoring themselves during a period of intense uncertainty, in the hope and anticipation of ‘normal’ futures that would feel familiar. For others, however, temporal disruption was experienced as liberating as new possibilities were imagined and new futures came into view. ‘What is clear across these varied experiences’, van Emmerick et al. argue, ‘is that temporal relations were unsettled … “the future” presented itself as a multiplicity, consisting of futures with different durations, attractions and affects; time was opened up towards multiple futures rather than projecting a linear future.’

In their analysis, van Emmerick et al. illustrate the enduring salience of the ‘major’ temporal structures that presume an unfolding of unidirectional time that reaches straightforwardly towards the (singular) future that is closely predicated on the linear continuation of past. However, many of the articles in this special issue illustrate some of the problems with this singular vision of the future, and our analysis of Adams et al.’s (2009) theorisation of anticipation, above, similarly highlights the limitations of this way of orienting ourselves temporally, affectively and ethically. In their analysis of the minor, van Emmerick et al. articulate a promising space for small acts of resistance – minor reclamations – that open up possibilities for alternative futures. ‘Nourishing a sensitivity to the minor’, they say,

helps us develop a minor sociology that takes futures seriously, which we argue matters in times of uncertainty that stretch beyond the pandemic … [A]s uncertainty comes to characterise everyday life in liberal democracies in the global north’, they conclude, ‘a minor sociology of futures becomes more necessary.

Adams et al. (2009) close their analysis of anticipation by asking what it might mean not to anticipate, and what strategies of refusal might be deployed instead. Across the articles contained in this special issue, we see the often problematic consequences of the operation of anticipation vis-à-vis a wide range of social issues. But in the contributions of Morgan and Tutton, and van Emmerick et al., we find useful suggestions for alternative futures – and alternative ways of temporally and morally orienting towards them, as well. In their critique of the implicit ableism of ‘the future’, Morgan and Tutton highlight both the necessity of imagining alternative, more inclusive futures, and the stakes of failing to do so. And in their analysis of minor acts of resistance to majoritarian temporal structures, van Emmerick et al. highlight both the necessity and the possibility of minor reclamations of alternative futures. In this sense, attending to the small acts of resistance in everyday life affords opportunities to imagine slightly different futures, ones that diverge from the kind of ableist fantasy of the (singular) future that Tutton and Morgan identify, and that allow for richer and more diverse futures, that more thoroughly accommodate the full range of experiences of the human condition.