Haunting Futures: Crisis, Migration and Anticipation in Iceland

The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis. It offers insights into timely crisis-ridden impacts and imaginings, migration processes and social understandings and practices. Through its attention to how people engage with crisis temporally and affectively, the book presents the crisis not simply as an isolated and distressing event but as a spectre embodied in time through ongoing anticipation.

Marek Pawlak is a social anthropologist working as Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He is the author of the book Zawstydzona tożsamośc. Emocje, ideologie i wladza w życiu polskich migrantów w Norwegii (Embarrassing Identity: Emotions, Ideologies and Power among Polish Migrants in Norway) published by the Jagiellonian University Press in 2018.