A future continuously present: Everyday economics in Athens

How is the future brought into being as an object of knowledge, activity, and concern in the present? This project takes up this question in contemporary Greece, examining how discourses and practices oriented around the economy construct a future, and how they gain hold as both legitimate and routine modes of thinking about and acting upon that future. Through ethnographic study of expert and everyday practices in fields ranging from economic forecasting to social insurance and national taxation, the project further considers how concern with the future plays a key role in enabling ideas about the economy to take shape and become familiar. Ultimately, it offers an account of how the future becomes a critical site for establishing and contesting claims to knowledge, authority, and belonging in the present.