Something In The Way

Reporting and Documenting the Experience of Being Adrift in Contemporary Times

Something In The Way: Phenomenological Reporting of Directionlessness in the 21st Century is a reflective ethnography and creative research project exploring what it feels like to live, work, and build in this moment of profound change. Through essays, conversations, and cultural observation, the project seeks to document the emotional texture of our present—how individuals experience hope, fatigue, direction, and silence amid accelerating social and technological transformation.

Rather than studying a single community, Feeling the Future traces two overlapping conditions of modern life: those intentionally working to build the future, and those who feel excluded or unheard within it. Drawing inspiration from literature and frameworks such as Paulo Freire’s notion of the “culture of silence,” or Derrida and Fisher’s use of “Hauntology,” the project asks how people come to understand their own agency—or its absence—within today’s complex systems of progress, participation, and belief.

In so many domains I traverse, this comes up as the elephant in the room. Whether it’s visionaries cloistering together in SF or Boston sorting out how much to lean into their shared sense of building something; social workers in training who are aiming to understand their role in this world of incomplete education and changing policy; or everyday folks who aren’t invested in being knowledge-workers putting together their worldview and sense of self in these changing times, it’s there.

I wanted to make a space for it, specifically. So much of our sense of directly centering the feeling is crowded out by the weight of the uneasiness it contains, as well as the pressure to craft or form or state conviction for a particular solution. But I think we need to, responsibly and in solidarity, let the feeling have its space. I want to be able to talk to people about it, and what they are doing in a world where it is increasingly easier to be faced with this feeling, or the pressures that may generate it. How do we make language, models, artifacts around it, so the literacy and communication about it, can happen?

— Jesse Parent

Hosted within JOPRO’s Futures Center, this project is led by Jesse Parent and will unfold as a public notebook and media series, including a website documenting written “dispatches from the present,” a discussion series exploring lived experience and meaning-making, and a journal and book club and literature study of related literature, alongside an evolving body of field notes and reflections. Over time, these threads will grow into a collective record of what it means to inhabit and interpret the early twenty-first century—an ethnography of feeling at the edge of the future.