This study explores utopia and dystopia as emotional ambivalence about the future, and asks how such utopia-dystopia ambivalence engages actors in desirable future-making. We investigate this phenomenon through the ongoing ethnographic study of the Regenerative Farming Pilot Network, where actors explore possible ways for creating a desirable dairy future, in which dairy farmers would contribute to tackling the ecological crisis by means of viable dairy farming. We observed how actors drew on their individual and collective pasts and futures to evoke both positive and negative emotions. They engaged in what we term 'temporal-emotion work' to reinvent the present while revisiting their futures and reliving their pasts. Actors fluctuated between opposing emotions whilst maintaining the opposition in between as they instantiated the past, future and present simultaneously to produce the desirable dairy future. Our study contributes to research on desirable future-making by showing how emotional ambivalence over different temporalities can be a generative force. To enact and produce desirable futures in the ongoing present, actors would need to not only engage with utopia-dystopia ambivalence but also actively evoke the pasts in relation to the present and future. We expand the literature on ambivalence and paradox by showcasing the centrality of emotions and the interconnectedness between temporality and emotionality for productive outcomes. Finally, this study has important implications for organizations in the agricultural sector by emphasizing the use of temporalities to evoke emotions that channel actors towards acting for a desirable future, thus helping to address ecological crises.
