Examining Pandemic Futurity

Abstract

‘The future’ is difficult to define. As with ‘time’ more generally, it has twin social and ontological connotations. This essay considers what Adam and Groves (2007) call “the present future” and “the future present”. The former being “process-based perspectives on futurity” like anticipatory knowledge practices and the latter being “the future as both an effecting process and/or as living” (Adam and Groves, 2007: 176). Covid-19 reinforces the necessity for the futures we envisage and enact in the twenty-first century to diverge from anthropocentrism towards an ethics of care whilst simultaneously acknowledging structural impediments to environmental, economic, and epidemiological justice. This article reaches these considerations in two ways. The first examines how the pandemic has transformed lived relationships with the future. The second links these relationships with the future to broader political temporalities including future-oriented governance. It is worth noting further here that these reflections are oriented predominantly towards the experience of the pandemic in the United Kingdom, given the extent to which they derive from my own experience. I believe, however, that they give rise to ideas and themes relevant in diverse historico-geographical contexts.