Around the world, experiences of ownership are turning toward temporary and contingent forms of possession. This Theorizing the Contemporary series explores temporary possession as both a state imposed by new forms of financialization and governance and a strategy chosen that creates spaces for innovation, experimentation, and world-building. The essays presented suggest that the edges of what is owned and by whom have become blurry and conditional, while the range of ways that people can access resources and assets has proliferated. In light of these diverse forms of temporary possession, the series encourages us to rethink our vocabularies around property and ownership. In doing so, we illuminate the seeds of new worlds-in-becoming within contemporary capitalism.

This series arises, in part, from work carried out by the European Research Council–funded Emerging Subjects Research Group and a workshop at University College London entitled “Rethinking Usufruct in the Global Economy.”