Generations: On Enjoying the Future

Public Lecture with Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

Overpopulation is an often-cited driver of resource scarcity and climate change, from Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century to Donna Haraway in the twenty-first. These concerns often exist in tension with the reality that there are abundant resources - they are simply hoarded to produce markets, while also creating hardships from those excluded from the market. Calls for a reduction in birth rates might be better conceptualized as concerns about one’s comfort and an exposure of the limits of one’s ability to elaborate a more inclusive and distributive future.

In this paper, I focus on the anthropology of parenting - specifically the works of Jean Briggs - to elaborate on the proliferation of “joy” as an affective technology to create more sustainable futures. Beset by limited resources and harsh environments, the Inuit that Briggs works with manage their affective experiences of each other and their environments to ensure their individual and collective survival; central to this is the cultivation of joy as a counterbalance to hardship. Drawing on feminist approaches to social reproduction and critiques of capitalism, I argue that reimagining the future as a context of manufactured scarcity provides a basis for critique that works against claims of overpopulation and toward the support for more caring institutions and imaginaries.

Bio

Matthew Wolf-Meyer, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (2012), Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019), Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), and American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within (2024). He is the editor of Proposals for a Caring Economy (2025), Mapping Medical Anthropology for the 21st Century (with Junko Kitanaka and Eugene Raikhel, 2025), and Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (with Denielle Elliott, 2023). His research focuses on the biology of everyday life, affective approaches to subjectivity, and posthuman bioethics.

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