ABSTRACT
The unmarked is defined as what is self-evident, mundane, taken for granted or implicit. It is a normalization of the normal of sorts. The paper argues to extend this framing as to include also what may be termed as the wrong normal, or the normal that should not be normal – e.g., refugees blocked in camps, social distancing measures in times of outbreak, clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church. Nowhere is this type of normalization more stringent than in relation with the projection of new futures in the context of unexpected events and crises. The chapter brings in the case study of the public policy response to the refugee crisis in Poland. The analysis of the insights provided by participants in the asylum policy field allows to indicate concrete manifestations of futures that were taken for granted, futures that were not there and wrong futures in the projections that were elaborated and normalized in the context of the refugee crisis of 2015–2016. The normalization does not always confirm the normative standards we are accustomed to, nor is it incremental. It also quite often breaks the boundaries of what is regarded as the good normal.
