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Crisis is frequently cast in generational terms: in the ‘lost generations’ of war or the AIDS pandemic, for example, or the disinherited generations left to live with the failures of their forebears to avert financial collapse or climate change. The trauma of these crises is increasingly understood to be inherited intergenerationally, rendering them chronic, and self-reproducing. We suggest intergenerational thinking is key to situating crisis in time –  whether by charting causation, assigning responsibility, conveying urgency, or orienting responses towards the future. Discussion about critical futures and about the enduring significance of the past around which crises are described often deploy and rely on a rhetoric of generational difference, even incommensurability and conflict. And yet, the analytic of generations is frequently overlooked in anthropological discussions of the most significant threats and challenges we face today, and when thinking about past and future crises. In this workshop, we seek to re-center generations in anthropological debates about wars, the climate crisis, financial upheaval, forced migration, and the framework of crisis in general. We will explore how intergenerational logic and frictions – in both interpersonal and political spheres – open up opportunities for the critical recalibration of history, as well as for social transformation.

How do people formulate, deploy, evade or refigure generations in times of crisis? How do generations create (or revive) new sorts of collectives, among kin, or across global political spaces? And how do these practices – and conflicts that emerge around them – shape and change our experiences of history, and our imaginations of the future?

This workshop will explore how the idea, discourse and practice of ‘generations’ tracks changes in social reasoning about the past, present, and future – creating conflicts that motivate transformation in relationships, values, and broader socio-political worlds. We will investigate how the framework of ‘generation’ allows people to situate themselves and their relations in history; to understand, contest and remake those selves and relations in historical context; and to seek and assert creative possibilities for change in times of crisis.