Temporalities in Translation. Anthropocene Futures, the SDGs and Justice in Baltimore

Abstract

Within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) process, different futures are contested, negotiated and become embedded in the Anthropocene. Those futures travel from one city to another, from businesses to local schools, or from protest events to the international negotiation fora of the United Nation (UN). By investigating the translation practices of Anthropocene futures from the global context of the UN into the local context of the city of Baltimore (United States), this paper traces how local actors engage with global norms and how they gain or lose agency in this process. Putting forward imaginaries of past, present and futures are practices of norm translation and appropriation that clearly change the once envisioned global future narratives. The paper brings together the Anthropocene scholarship with the International Relations-literature on translation. I suggest a new conceptual approach of translation that includes notions of ruptures, discontinuities and present pasts as main factors in translation processes. I apply this new framework to the case of SDG localization in Baltimore. In doing so, I analyse three major reports and 10 qualitative interviews that I conducted with local actors from the university, the city administration as well as different civil society actors in 2018. Here, I will discuss the different temporal notions, more specifically the way futures and pasts intersect in non-linear processes of translation.