CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Philip Roscoe Organizing (at) the end of the world
The project explores how contemporary crises (climate emergency, ecosystem collapse, and global pandemic, among others) constitute an ever-present apocalyptic backdrop against which we see the construction of new modes of biopolitics and new security apparatuses. The project emphasises the tension between the dystopian imaginaries of late capitalism and more optimistic visions of a world saved by market-driven technology or by sustainable consumption—a tension that licenses new biopolitical modes of governance, new forms of enclosure and exclusion, and new possibilities for speculative accumulation. This tension lies at the core of contemporary capitalism and its often enthusiastically imagined futures.
In geographical terms, “end of the world” speaks to the physical remoteness of the empirical sites—whether in the wildness of north-eastern Scotland, the offshore world of global logistics, or the terra nova of global capital—spaces of liminality, otherness, and enchantment—a quality that also obscures the concrete socio-technical work of future-making. The project proposes that the end of times, if properly organised, paradoxically presents the greatest opportunity for speculation.