The Future in Times of Crisis – A Workshop
15 December 2026 II 10 am - 4.30 pm
Melbourne Law School
By Joseph Keppler (1893) http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/art/artifact/Ga_Cartoon/Ga_cartoon_38_00392.htm, Public Domain
Capitalism structures the relationship between present and future by way of speculation, debt, investment and (projected) return. Both the sovereignty of state and the corporate legal personality have long been crucial to this structure because they presume and facilitate activity in perpetuity. More recently, neoliberalism has intensified the dependence of our social structures on this relationship between present and future, even as we lurch from crisis to crisis. Bailouts for institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’ lest their collapse bring down the system both reveal and exacerbate the level of risk participants are willing to take in the name of future return.
But what is the nature and limit of this faith in the future? Can our faith in perpetuity itself be maintained in the face of the proliferating geopolitical, environmental and social crises? What kind of faith in the future is held by technology billionaires who seek to transform the nature of society through artificial intelligence while obsessing about end-times and reprising fascist conceptions of the destiny of different cultural groups? And what should we learn from the relationship between their rhetoric and the ways they and their political allies seek to insulate themselves from catastrophe rather than attend to its causes?
This workshop will engage with how conceptions of the future and the end-times structure our political present. It will feature discussion of work in progress, a reading of a recent piece by Professor Melinda Cooper (ANU) (with Professor Cooper in discussion), and a thematic discussion of how we encounter End-Times thinking in our research. We will also be joined by Professor James Martel, San Francisco State University.
This workshop is jointly hosted with the ARC Discovery Project: International Law and the Challenge of Populism.
For more information regarding the workshop, contact Dr Richard Joyce (richard.joyce@unimelb.edu.au).
The workshop will be followed by a public lecture by Professor James Martel, San Francisco State University. For more information and the registration link, visit the LPGCIL events page.