Emergency framing and alternative futures

Peter Sutoris shares with us his thoughts on emergency framing and alternative futures in the thirteenth blog in this series based on the IGDC/YESI Webinar event ‘Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene.’

Peter Sutoris’s research interests include the anthropology of development, the role of education in development, cross-cultural scalability of development interventions, development ethics, critical and decolonial perspectives on modernity and progress, post-development, development communications and environmental sustainability. Peter joined us in this webinar to discuss emergency framing and alternative futures.

Does Emergency Framing narrow our vision?

From my perspective, as someone who thinks a lot about how we as a society conceptualise the future, and what we are understanding the future to be as an object, as imagination, as a space; this framing of emergency tends to very much constrain the way that we think about the future. It tends to create a very narrow vision and a narrow pathway towards that vision.

I think at the moment, we are essentially looking at two competing visions. One of which has to do with destruction; we are imagining a planet that’s not livable, we are imagining potentially an extinction scale event that might impact humanity. And on the other hand, we are imagining what the alternative might be to that kind of a scenario, and I think that’s where technological utopianism comes in, this idea of technology driven solutions, which also has its own problems not least because many of the technologies that we are relying on in our visions of an alternative future are not yet ready. Many come with lots of ethical challenges and ethical problems and, indeed, some of them actually impact other aspects of life on Planet Earth in negative ways. So I think we have to be careful about framing something as an emergency and thinking about what are the implications of that to the actual solutions in the pathways forward.

Is putting climate in the spotlight at the expense of other crises?

One of the main implications that I see as a problem with this framing is that we have put the climate into the spotlight at the expense of many of the other environmental crises and, as a matter of fact, some of the ways in which we are trying to deal with the climate emergency is impacting negatively on, for example, the biodiversity crisis and some of the other aspects of what I call in my work “the environmental multi crisis”. This is something to be aware of when it comes to what the actual material outcome is of this framing.

Is emergency framing at the mercy of the elite?

I think there’s another set of questions which is not just about the kind of future that we ultimately achieve but also the lens of social justice. Because, to my mind, what we are seeing in terms of the imagination of these sort of competing visions of the future is a certain kind of polarisation of society between the so called ‘elites’ and the so called ‘masses’, where it is the elites that get to decide what the blueprints for the future look like, such as some of the techno utopian blueprints that are currently very much dominating the conversation about climate and therefore the wider conversation about the environment. Whereas the so-called masses, the vast majority of the human population, are expected to basically get in line and to support these blueprints with their actions.

What are the social justice implications?

The rights to speak to the future, the rights to imagine an alternative future, the rights to bring an alternative future into being; I think the exclusion of the imaginative potential of the diverse populations on earth is very much a justice problem that we need to face.

In my own research in education, I see this clearly expressed in the way that we approach the way that we teach young people about the planet, about the future. We’ve got mostly government run under resourced school systems which are training the workers of the future, the people who are meant to become the cogs in the machine so to speak, and then we’ve got a small number of elite institutions which are training the so called leaders of the future who are meant to be the elites that come up with these blueprints that the rest of society is meant to follow.

This is something we very much need to pay attention to and to think about, not just from the perspective of solving the crisis, but also from the perspective of justice. 

I completely understand why we use the emergency framing. Of course there’s an urgency about these issues and the emergency framing helps us convey that urgency, but I think we have to be careful about the implications of that framing and, to my mind, maybe trying to counterbalance some of those implications. 

We need to place a lot of emphasis on the strength of our democracy, on the sort of channels that individuals have to speak to the future and about the future in ways that are empowering and actually transformative, not just tokenistic. If we are going to use this framing, we have to also think of corresponding ways of mitigating some of these potentially negative implications.

Checkout the full version of Peter’s talk:

About the author

He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and completed his PhD at University of Cambridge in 2019. His research interests include the anthropology of development, the role of education in development, cross-cultural scalability of development interventions, development ethics, critical and decolonial perspectives on modernity and progress, post-development, development communications and environmental sustainability.