_In everyday life, time most often appears in the form of the clock – abstract, seemingly objective, a ‘natural’ fact of life. However, as anthropologists and sociologists have long noted, ‘time’ is not a neutral container for social life, but a source of values, concepts and logics that are utilised in negotiating the complexity of social life.

In drawing out the implications of this, time has come to be recognised as having an important role in communal methods of inclusion and exclusion and the production of social norms, as well as in understandings of legitimacy and agency, processes of social change, communal futures and pasts, the experiences of accelerating global networks, the ideal pacing of economic productivity, the contradictions between human and ecological time-frames. Each aspect further shapes who or what can be understood as being part of a community and in what ways.

Crucially, insofar as time remains naturalised the broader social work performed by particular mobilisations of time becomes obscured. Thus, in seeking to critically engage with issues such as the changing nature of communities, the potential for more inter-connected communities and the value of communities more generally, we believe it is essential to explore how assumptions about time may be involved.

Given the complicated and wide-ranging role of temporality in some of the most pressing questions about social mechanisms of connectivity, belonging and exclusion we are interested in bringing this variety of approaches into conversation. 

The Temporal Belongings project thus aims to provide a space for researchers across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences to develop a more coordinated understanding of the interconnections between time and community. We will be providing opportunities to share our research and develop multi-disciplinary collaborations, as well as creating new resources to support the development of this research area.