IRTG 2445: Temporalities of Future in Latin America: Dynamics of Aspiration and Anticipation

With its research into Latin American temporalities of the future, the IRTG has succeeded in establishing an innovative, internationally respected research focus and in expanding a close, forward-looking qualification and research cooperation between Freie Universit?t Berlin, Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin and Universit?t Potsdam with three of Mexico’s most renowned research institutions: El Colegio de México, Universidad National Autónoma de México and Centro de Investigaciones e Estudios Superiores de Antropología Social. The IRTG is dedicated to researching temporalities of the future in a unique interdisciplinary and international constellation in which sociology, history, cultural and social anthropology, literature and cultural studies, economics, educational studies and political science in Mexico and Germany work together. In the process, Latin America has surfaced as a continent that is seen as an exemplary setting of a polycentric globalisation marked by power asymmetries and characterised by a particular cultural heterogeneity and social inequalities. The distinction between aspirations and anticipations will also be used as a basis in the coming funding phase: It serves to differentiate between projections that actors make of future times and thus actively bring about futures (aspirations), and practices with which actors act in relation to unavoidable and uncontrollable developments or to possible and uncertain futures and thus cope with contingencies (anticipations). With the help of this distinction, the researchers and doctoral fellows of the IRTG will continue to explore three sub-areas, by means of which the projects can be systematised into sub-groups and led into a fruitful exchange: 1) Protagonists of the future, 2) Projections of the future, 3) Processes that affect the future. In the second funding phase, the IRTG will further develop and adjust the previous research programme, building on previous findings and responding to currently pressing questions. It is dedicated to researching the reciprocal relationships between long-term processes and medium-term future projections on the one hand and short-term anticipations on the other. Attention will be increasingly focused on everyday, immediate future-oriented activities that are carried out, for example, with reference to the reality of the pandemic and for the purpose of meeting vital needs. The central conceptual and theoretical goal in the second funding period is to develop new analytical descriptive categories for Latin American temporalities of the future, breaking away from geometric notions of time such as ‘linear’ and ‘cyclical’. The IRTG enables qualified young researchers to realise innovative doctoral projects in a stimulating, intercultural and interdisciplinary research environment.