Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes CREOLE

MA Seminar: The Antelives of Things: An Anthropology of the Unfinished

Dienstag, 17.03.2026

Deserted concrete structures, faded billboards, bridges that end in mid-air over a precipice: In a world left in wrecks by capitalism and held in constant limbo by its speculative practices, traces of the unfinished and the unbuilt have become an integral of everyday life. The unfinished is an umbrella term that, in the study of planning and infrastructure can indicate various states of a project: “proposed, planned, funded, underway, delayed, failed, abandoned, and so on.” (Carse & Kneas 2019: 13). Though in contrast to ruins, left obsolete and discarded after use, the unfinished gives us a sense of futures past – instead of the afterlife, attending to the unfinished gives us insight int o what we will explore in this course as the antelives of things. As a relational condition, the unfinished shapes bonds between communities and their environments both materially and affectively, as it generates hopeful promises for the future, but also anxiety-inducing threats of danger and decay; it catalyzes practices from protest and community organizing to repair and repurposing. In this course, we are going to ask: What are the economic, social and environmental conditions within which the unfinished emerges? What future trajectories and ecologies of becoming can it help us trace against the grain of accumulation? Departing from the anthropological study of planning and infrastructure, we will critically assess the “unfinished” as a phenomenon inherent to contemporary capitalism, the speculative aspirations formulated therein, and the construction of time as a realm of progress-oriented linear unfolding. By familiarizing ourselves with philosophical, architectural and ethnographic theorizations of the concept, the unfinished will be looked at as a spatial property as well as a temporal and affective condition within which the social is produced in gendered, racialized and otherwise embodied ways. Employing a variety of different methods, including experimental writing exercises and visual analysis, the participants will be expected to engage with a selected empirical example – the plan of an unrealized building, an unused bus stop in their neighborhood, an abandoned website, an unfinished mural in their hometown – throughout the duration of the course, as well as in their final essays.

Dozierende(r):	Dr. Sabrina Stallone
17.03.2026:	10:15 - 12:00
Ort:	2. Etage, S 201, Seminarraum UniS Schanzeneckstrasse 1

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