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Uncertain futures and everyday hedging in a humanitarian city

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Published online on

Abstract

In this paper, I take up diverse ways in which the uncertain future mobilises action in the now, and consider what kinds of socialities and economies such actions toward the future produce. Thinking from the vantage point of Juba, South Sudan, I show how the openness of space and time to emergence shape the everyday practices of anticipating, hedging for and living through a future and present that is radically uncertain. I argue that the defining features of such everyday hedging are (i) an implicitly spatial frame of comparison, (ii) a fraught interdependence between lack of reliable knowledge and calculative practices and finally (iii) their capacity to generate value in the face of risk. I consider futurity and elsewheres as modalities of difference – that is, as conditions for the unfolding of becoming and the emergence of the new, as well as requirements for surprise. Although Juba may be considered a limit case, I argue that practices of everyday hedging – whatever their particularities – are critical to better understanding futurity and the complex socialities on which the economic relies.