26. Planning elusive futures in times of uncertainty

Sourdough baking offers a powerful lens for exploring how everyday practices help navigate disrupted futures. Feeding and tending sourdough cultures has become a steady rhythm of the everyday life for many. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when avoiding one type of microbes was paramount, many turned their attention to nurturing other types of microbes. This human-microbial relationship not only provided sustenance but also fostered a sense of community in times of enforced isolation.

Sourdough’s role in navigating uncertainty extends beyond the pandemic. Historically, it has been a lifeline during crises, with countless stories of sourdough mothers being safeguarded during migration and upheaval. Immigrants have carried sourdough cultures across borders—smeared onto cloths or stored in jars—to ensure food security and maintain culinary traditions in new unknown lands. For instance, sourdough was preserved by Estonian refugees during WWII, transported across the sea before the genocide in Gaza, and safeguarded by Icelandic bakers in the aftermath of volcanic eruptions.

This paper examines sourdough baking as a practice of grounding and caring for near and distant futures during times of societal disruption. It explores how this slow, deliberate activity helps individuals and communities find roots in turbulent contexts and reimagine security in the face of unpredictable futures. By connecting past, present, and future, sourdough baking becomes a resilient practice of care and continuity across generations.

In 2024 the Swedish government initiated a campaign in which Swedish residents were to be made aware of the importance of crisis preparedness (krisberedskap). Our paper explores how young people (16–24 years old) are affected by and/or engage in this crisis preparedness in a particular time of uncertainty and societal crises.

How are young people mobilized into crisis preparedness through campaigns and information? What are their expectations and fears when it comes to their own possible involvement or participation in civil and military defense practices? How does preparedness for existentially disruptive events such as war or societal collapse affect young people's everyday lives and their perceptions of a predictable future and life trajectory?

In this paper we will focus on two separate historical periods of crisis/societal preparedness among young adults. We will present some preliminary results based on ethnographic fieldwork in present time as well as on archive material from the 1940s. Our focus will first of all be on how crisis preparedness is established among young people by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) in contemporary time. Secondly, we also look at a historical organization called Sweden’s Youth Preparedness (Sveriges Ungdomsberedskap) and its activities within food supply in the 1940s. The goal is to understand crisis/societal preparedness in present time both in itself and in contrast to a historical period when crisis preparedness was essential. We will reflect on how ethnology can contribute to research on crisis preparedness through ethnographic and historical analysis and methods. 

We often think of human development as a linear trajectory from helpless child to independent adult. However, adults with intellectual disability who continue to depend on their parents for care disrupt such developmental norms. This unsettling of temporal norms also affects the parents of such adults, who having to assist their grown children with the tasks of adulthood find themselves out of sync with normative life scripts. Further, as the public support systems intended to help people with disabilities live independently are being dismantled in Sweden, such parents end up having to plan for the uncertain future when they themselves can no longer be there to help their children.

In this paper, I present material from my forthcoming doctoral thesis on contemporary Swedish family norms as seen through the lens of prenatal screening practices. Drawing on interviews with parents of children with disabilities, I show how they grapple with their family’s departure from chrononormativity and how they rearrange their plans and priorities to accommodate the future of their adult children. Some parents respond to these uncertain futures with political activism, lobbying against the austerity measures threatening assistance for people with disabilities. Others choose to expand their family in the hopes of creating a network capable of caring for their children after they have passed. But what potential burdens does that put on future sibling-guardians? And what if political activism does not bring about any positive change? It would seem there are no certain ways to plan for such elusive futures…

This paper asks how people articulate the experience of changing home as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the Nordic research project Disrupted Temporalities, we explore how crises such as the pandemic rearrange our temporal perspectives – how we look backwards and forwards in time. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of life scripts, family time, and identity work, this paper examines a sample of personal stories collected by the Norwegian Ethnological Research from 2020 to 2022. In these stories, people write about how the pandemic has ushered them into new – or old – living arrangements, either temporarily during the lockdowns or permanently.

In their accounts of these relocations, people tend to articulate their experiences as either a step forward into the next stage of life, or backward into a previous stage. Moving into one's partner's house may be described as a speeding up of a planned development, a movement towards a more settled, grown-up life. Moving back to one's parents’ home may be described as a return to a previous, adolescent life phase.

These stories suggest that the disruption of the pandemic may have mobilized people to seek living arrangements that represented long-term relations and stability. But to change house, either temporarily or permanently, often involves a disruption of the routines and rhythms of one's earlier everyday life. To move requires some form of identity work. Past selves need to be worked into the present self that is both coping with the here-and-now and looking towards the future.

During societal crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic the future as a stable framework for planning has been profoundly disrupted. In the Nordic research project Disrupted Temporalities, we examine responses to folk-life archives’ questionnaires from the past five years—a period characterised by crises and uncertainty. These narratives reveal a heightened sensitivity across generations to how anticipated futures, as well as fears and hopes for them, can shift, evolve, or even be abandoned during times of disruption. 

During the pandemic, individuals developed diverse strategies to cope with uncertainty: some used apps to track time and key dates, others wrote diaries or kept statistics on the global spread of the virus. The Covid-19 responses underscore the importance of planning for the near future and maintaining hope that crises will be resolved relatively swiftly. 

Generational differences emerge in these materials: older respondents refer to past crises that they have endured and focus on the welfare of future generations. Younger generations express concerns about both the present and the future. The accounts related to the pandemic illustrate how generational position and culturally shared life ‘scripts’ shape expectations of the future. These expectations are disrupted by crises, influencing how individuals attempt to plan, prepare, and care for elusive futures—not only their own but also those extending beyond their lifetimes. This paper aims to shed light on how generational differences are conveyed, and how they influence future planning in uncertain times.