Public talk: Anticipation, Hesitation and Disastrous Futures

The HESTIA Lab at The University of Newcastle invites you to a free public lunch talk! In this talk, we engage with the different, often contrasting, ways of how people prepare for and respond to looming disastrous futures. Drawing on our ethnographies of bushfire disasters in eastern Australia, we embrace an affective temporal register and problematise the anticipation–hesitation nexus as temporal and affective sets of actions, anti-actions and in-actions in the context of runaway climate catastrophe. While anticipation includes interventions pulling disastrous futures into the present, hesitation implies keeping these futures at a close affective distance. Convention stipulates that action-oriented planning and preparedness initiatives are best practice, rendering anything short of this as problematic or, indeed, a failure. We ask what the value is of less-than-certain affective and temporal orientations to climate catastrophe. We outline the ways that interlocutors variously apprehend disasters through action as well as in-action and anti-action to develop new temporal and affective horizons. These horizons point to social engagement with disaster-as-process and its lingering effects embodied in particular moments and mood. Guest speaker bios Timothy Heffernan is a social and political anthropologist at the Australian National University where he works as a lecturer. His current research concerns the affective states of residents living in disaster prone areas in Australia, including hesitation, fear, indifference, silence, and alienation. He is the author of the forthcoming book Compassionate Solidarity: Crisis, Recovery and Kincentric Politics in Iceland (Toronto UP, 2027) and co-editor of The Anthropology of Ambiguity (Manchester UP, 2024). In 2025 he established Norden@ANU, a collaborative initiative bringing together researchers working across the Nordic and Asia-Pacific regions. Marek Pawlak is a social anthropologist at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków where he works as an associate professor. His current research includes bushfire disasters, preparedness and infrastructures in eastern Australia. In recent years, he has worked on economic crisis, hauntings and anticipation in Iceland as well as emotions, nationalism, social class, gender and care relations in the Polish migrant community in Norway. He is the author of Haunting Futures: Crisis, Migration and Anticipation in Iceland (Berghahn 2025) and Zawstydzona tożsamość. Emocje, ideologia i władza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii [Embarrassing Identity. Emotions, Ideologies and Power among Polish Migrants in Norway] (Jagiellonian University Press 2018). Join us in X803, Level 8 NUSpace, in the University of Newcastle's city campus. Coffee and tea will be provided - BYO Lunch.