The seminar engages with ethnographic exploration of how the 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising state with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Iceland, I will show how the complex relationships of the past and the anticipatory modes of the (continuous) present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming crisis futures. These crisis futures haunt and are haunted; they follow, inspire and push people to think thoughts and do things, including the creation of otherwise unthinkable alignments, that had once been difficult to imagine. Shedding new light on anthropological understandings of social ruptures, human agency, active meaning-making, and resilience, the seminar offers insights into the lived affective and temporal ways of being in our troubling and troubled 21st-century world.

Marek Pawlak is a social anthropologist at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland) and a visiting researcher for the 2025/2026 academic year at the School of Built Environment, University of New South Wales in Sydney. In his research, Marek focuses on crises, disasters, infrastructures, futures, migration, affects and emotions. In recent years, he has conducted fieldwork on hauntings and anticipation in Iceland as well as on intersections between national identity, social class, gender and care in the Polish migrant community in Norway. Currently, he is working on a project entitled “Bushfires, Anticipatory Infrastructure and Preparedness in Eastern Australia” funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange.

In-person: Room TBC

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1