Climate Change Temporalities: Narratives, Representations and Practices
A conference on humanistic approaches to climate change University of Bergen, Norway, 3-5 August 2020 [NB Date change for this conference from 5-7 to 3-5 August] When we think about climate change, what first springs to mind is probably carbon emissions, extreme weather, draughts, floods, and melting icebergs. But climate change is just as much about time and timescales, pace and acceleration: Climate scientists incorporate lessons from the geological past in modeling possible future climates, politicians are coping with questions of how to make future societies resilient, and environmentalists are calling for immediate action. Climate change challenges established human understandings of time. Macro-scales such as geological time and historical time become entangled, but just as important is the way changes in climate affect everyday life reasoning, based in personal experiences and immediacy. Climate change also interferes with family life, turning hopes and dreams for the future of “our children” into fear and worries. This conference will approach how the wide range of more or less entangled temporalities of a changing climate are narrated, represented or expressed through performances and practices. We welcome papers discussing temporalities of climate change both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. The papers may examine quite different societal fields, such as everyday life, art, education, heritage, politics and science, for instance on topics such as:
Send an abstract (maximum 300 words) for a 20 minutes presentation to: futurenow@uib.no before March 1, 2020. The abstract must include: your name, affiliation and email address. For more information see https://future.w.uib.no/conference/ Terrains of Time: Modern Temporality(ies) in Social Sciences and Beyond
An International Workshop, Bar Ilan University, Israel June 14-15, 2020 Time has been studied, researched, and thought over for thousands of years and across cultures. In recent decades, some accounts of the role of time and temporality in human (and non-human) experiences proved fruitful for contemporary thought and research. Those who dared to ask St. Augustine's renowned question—"what, then, is time?"— developed vital and fascinating insights about human and non-human nature(s), cultures, societies, environments, emotions, personalities, and politics. A nuance- sensitive understanding of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of time is of immense potential. Nevertheless, time as a category is an understudied topic in the traditional humanities and social sciences. Even though Time Studies is now institutionalized in academia (societies, journals, etc.), the field has hardly crystalized into an organized body of knowledge with its own defined and structured vocabulary, working assumptions, controversies, and research agendas, to be reflected in other disciplines. Today, the scholar of space, body and other similar categories can draw from these fields' respective bodies of knowledge. But this is not always the case with Time Studies. Is it a mere problem of institutionalization, or rather does it have to do with Augustin's wonder, i.e. with the elusiveness of the concept of time? The international workshop "Terrains of Time" is aimed at developing an integrative and interdisciplinary conversation about time as a social and cultural phenomenon, while accounting for global and local contexts. Topics: ¨ Time and temporality: definitions, analytical frameworks, narratives, and symbolizations. ¨ Time and related categories: space, body, and subjectivity. ¨ Time and humanity; time in (or after) the Anthropocene. ¨ Time and the social: The role of time in assembling and disassembling individuals and groups, personalities and collectives, actors and networks; measurement, standardization, multi-temporalities, synchronization, and desynchronization. ¨ Time and power: social and political struggles waged about time as a resource, for example regarding status, gender, and labor; time in public policy, social stratification (e.g. age stratification), evaluation and criticism; Time regimes; Global, local, and networked temporalities. ¨ Time and the market: commodification, trading, and soliciting time; Time poverty and affluence. ¨ Micro-interactions: waiting, rushing, getting prepared, aging, time wasting, "quality time," transitions, cheating on time. ¨ Rituals of time, times of rituals. ¨ Time and morality: temporal distributive justice. ¨ Time in ecological challenges and technological developments. ¨ Risk, readiness, and uncertainty (e.g. in future studies). ¨ Time and cultural relativity: Are there groups that experience "more" or "less" time, or groups that have "more" or "less" temporality? Do certain groups care about time more than others? ¨ Time and "the moderns": was the modern period embedded in "temporalization of the experienced life", as maintained by Koselleck and echoed in Latour's conceptualization of the modern? Did a "temporal turn" take place in history, and/or in theory? On the other hand, are industrialized societies poorer in time (while being affluent in other resources), as common wisdom so often holds? The workshop will explore the social, cultural, political, economic, human, and environmental dimensions of time and temporality(ies) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to: philosophy, literature, psychology, geography, history, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies. The workshop will take place at Bar Ilan University on June 14-15, 2020. No registration fee is required, but we cannot assist with travel expenses. Confirmed guest speakers: ¨ Barbara Adam, Emerita Professor, Cardiff University and Affiliate Scholar, IASS Potsdam ¨ Judy Wajcman, Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics ¨ Frédéric Worms, Professor of Philosophy, École normale supérieure Abstracts of up to 300 words for a 20-minute paper, with a short bio, may be sent to: terrainsoftime2019@gmail.com no later than January 15, 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2020. The international workshop is organized by the Research Group "It's about Time", sponsored by Bar Ilan's Rector, Prof. Miriam Faust; and under the auspices of the Bar Ilan Center for Cultural Sociology. Organizing committee (alphabetical order): Anat Leibler, Miri Rozmarin, Hizky Shoham, Dror Yinon (Interdisciplinary Studies Unit, Bar Ilan University). The Fifth Biennial Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) will be held at University College London in the Summer of 2020. The conference’s theme – Futures – aims to engage seriously and critically with the often stated aims of heritage to address the concerns of future generations, whilst also asking participants to think expansively and creatively about the future of critical heritage studies as an emergent field of focus across a range of academic disciplines.
Sessions, discussion panels, papers, posters and films will explore a range of issues, including (but not limited to): the future of critical heritage studies; newly emerging concepts, themes and methods for the study of heritage; the future of heritage management, governance and diplomacy; evolving and nascent forms of heritage, and how they might be recognised; heritage as future-making; the “time” of heritage and its relationship with the past, present and future; future impacts of climatological, ecological, economic, political and social change on heritage; future relations of natural and cultural heritage in the light of the recognition of the Anthropocene; and the future of heritage itself. The local conference organising committee has identified a series of sub-themes which will represent distinct threads through the conference, and session organisers and paper proposers are asked to select one of these sub-themes when they submit their proposals. All proposals must identify at least one relevant conference sub-theme upon submission. Please contact the relevant sub-theme convenor(s) for any queries about a specific theme. The deadline for the call for curated sessions, individual papers, posters, films and discussion panels is midnight UK time on the 31st October 2019. See https://achs2020london.com/submissions/ for full details. DEADLINE EXTENDED — SEPT 15, 2019
Our seventh event is taking place on 22-23 November, 2019. It will be our first event in the US, and is being organized by Zach Kaiser (Michigan State University) and Erin Glass (University of California, San Diego) with coordinating assistance from Filip Vostal (Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences) and Mark Carrigan (Cambridge University, UK). In theory, the academy is an institution of research and learning, intended to advance human knowledge and educate citizens. In practice, however, the academy appears evermore as a site of prospecting, or a source of raw material for aggressive forms of neoliberal mining and extraction. Through various speculative and extractive behaviors, academic practice is increasingly managed and shaped by internal and external forces as a means of “optimizing” academic activities and making them more efficient in order to cut costs and maximize revenue. As is well documented in the growing literature of critical university studies, this prospecting is manifest in the adjunctification of academic labor, the rise of administration, the continuous increase of student tuition, and the perpetuation of the student debt crisis that has engulfed the United States. We can also see prospecting in the ruthless capture and privatization of scholarly research by scholarly publishers at the cost of public access to research that the public has in fact already paid for. Prospecting is also at play in the academy’s collision course with surveillance/platform/cognitive capitalism: the university’s intellectual products have been transformed into valuable data to be mined, packaged, sold, and ultimately controlled by IT and ed tech capitalists in their pursuit of profit. Though these extractive and neoliberal processes are not unique to the academy, their presence in institutions dedicated to learning has implications for academic subjectivities and the institutions themselves. Building on the work of past Accelerated Academy symposia, the 7th edition proposes the concept of “prospecting” as a productive tool to think through the future of academic life, labor, and outcomes. Prospecting as a concept may help us broaden the discourses about academia, and shine light on the different economic interests, technical assemblages, and affective regimes that shape its activities. We are also, however, committed to the challenge of identifying prospects of autonomy and liberation that are still within the academy despite its compromised state, and thinking through the strategies that academics might use to better take advantage of them. We encourage contributors to consider the various material and social connotations carried by the term “prospecting,” and the way it might help us develop a robust analysis of life in the accelerated academy and the high stakes of our contemporary moment. Topics might include:
We welcome contributions (ranging from paper presentations to artistic projects, hands-on sessions, projections, tours, etc) from anyone who is interested in and passionate about these topics. We will also do our best to accommodate remote presentations/projects via video conferencing or other possibilities. Submit a 500-word abstract using the Google Form linked below by September 15, 2019. Questions? Email Zach Kaiser (kaiserza [at] msu [dot] edu) and Erin Glass (erglass [at] ucsd [dot] edu). You can submit to the CFP here: https://forms.gle/QHhQUQ6cLkHjut8KA https://accelerated.academy/prospecting-extraction-speculation-and-liberation-in-the-accelerated-academy/ The CELA is pleased to announce the Call for Abstracts for the 2020 Council of Educators in Landscape ArchitectreAnnual Conference, 100 Years of CELA: Deep Time
Abstract Submission Deadline: Midnight, September 16, 2019 The Conference will be held from March 18-21 at the Louisville Marriott Downtown in Louisville, Kentucky. Submit an abstract. The deadline to submit abstracts is Sept. 16, 2019, 12:00 am, Author's time zone. Go to https://www.openconf.org/CELA2020/papers/openconf.php and review the conference overview, submission guidelines, and new information about abstract submissions and registration, including student submissions, new track themes, and first author responsibilities. When done, scroll down to find Authors, click on submit an abstract to fill in the requested information. IMPORTANT: To make edits to your abstract, log-in using your Abstract ID# (not your email) and your created password. Sign up to be an Abstract Reviewer. Go to https://www.openconf.org/CELA2020/papers/openconf.php and scroll down to Review and Program Committees. Enter revkey in the Keycode Box, and press Enter. You may sign up to review abstracts in one or more CELA tracks. Once all the abstracts are assigned, you will receive a notice to begin your reviews, as well as instructions on completing the reviews. Find The Conference Overview and Submission Guidelines here. The CELA 2020 website is still under construction. Please check back for updates on registration, lodging, and field sessions: http://thecela.org/cela-2020/ Questions regarding abstract submissions: cela2020.louisville@gmail.com Questions regarding the conference: director@thecela.org Call For Papers: /MC Journal/ ‘Time’*
Nearly 50 years on from Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, contemporary society finds itself in a new technological age where time is taking on a turbulent and elusive edge. We are reconciling a coexistence of distinct but simultaneous temporalities through digital media, and consequently there is a multiplicity of ways of being in time; a key aspect of our contemporaneity. According to Terry Smith, our contemporaneity is characterised “by the insistent presentness of multiple, often incompatible temporalities accompanied by the failure of all candidates that seek to provide the overriding temporal framework – be it modern, historical, spiritual, evolutionary, geological, scientific, globalizing, planetary… Everything about time these days – and therefore about place, subjectivity, and sociality – is at once intensely here, is slipping, or has become artefactual”. With Smith in mind, time today becomes evasive, contradictory and antonymous while forming a sense of urgency around the changing present. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to unpack the nuances of contemporaneity in digital society today. *Areas of investigation may include but are not limited to:* * Contemporaneity as the condition in which we grapple the present in a time of social, political and ecological turbulence * Conceptualisations of time in neoliberal contexts * Temporal rationalisations with contemporary media and technology, including but not limited to wearable technologies and GPS tracking devices * Technology and efficiency * Somatechnical approaches to the body, media, and time * Speculative futures with digital media * Mediating the present * Forecasting and modelling futures in the 21st Century Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition). *Details* Article deadline: 4 Oct. 2019 Release date: 4 Dec. 2019 Editors: Christina Chau and Laura Glitsos Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to time@journal.media-culture.org.au We would like to announce that we will be postponing our upcoming Temporal Belongings conference until 2021. We are looking into ways to move our approach to an online/nearly carbon neutral framework and will need the extra time to explore options and redesign our activities. We ask you to bear with us while we develop our approach. We aim to have a CFP for our event in early 2020. Our hope is to contribute a prototype for this type of conference, one that rethinks the role of synchronisation in a time of climate emergency and how we might facilitate ways of sharing our research in less resource intensive ways. Why we are doing this The recent IPCC special report, along with movements such as the School Strike for Climate and Extinction Rebellion have helped concentrate thinking about how we conduct our professional activities as academics. Here in the UK there have been a number of articles in The Guardian that have prompted discussion, and recently I was pleased to be directed towards the Flying Less project which has been championing reductions in business travel since 2015. In the UK and the US in particular, there has also been discussion of the impact that increased visa costs and visa refusals have had on who can attend conferences, which have already been relatively exclusive affairs. While it was really exciting to launch a new conference series with The Social Life of Time, we experienced delegates in majority world countries, as well as European PhDs and precarious academics unable to afford the event. Some of our accepted delegates experienced visa troubles and couldn't attend, losing money on advance bookings. We also estimate that around 175 tonnes of CO2e were emitted through travel to the conference (equivalent to the energy use of an average house over 13.5 years). Since we started in 2011 the Temporal Belongings network has made it a key feature of our events to not only talk about time and belonging, but to also experiment with our own academic forms of temporal organisation. We are excited to take this approach even further in our next conference. Feedback, questions, suggestions Email us at temporalbelongings@gmail.com Michelle Bastian, on behalf of the 2nd Temporal Belongings Conference organising team Special Issue Call for Papers | The Timescapes of Teaching in Higher Education
Time and change have become significant yet taken-for-granted discourses across globalised, diversified and corporatised higher education (HE) landscapes. Contemporary HE is characterized by a precarious uncertainty, increasingly driven by strong narratives of anticipated futures. Anticipated change in the present and the future is projected onto the institutional and individual investments, risks, promises and possibilities that higher education presents at multiple levels and in a range of contexts. However, the inequalities that underpin different future-oriented investments in higher education are often made invisible by the logic of making the ‘right’ (calculated and rational) choices and ‘effectively’ managing time and change in the present (this plays out differently in different contexts). Despite the centrality of time in the (re)framing and restructuring of an imagined contemporary higher education landscape, there has been limited consideration given to conceptualizing time in HE research. The dearth of research on higher education that foregrounds questions of time tends in itself to assist in the taken-for-granted ‘business-as-usual’ or TINA (there is no alternative) effect, reproducing particular spatio-temporal structures, practices, embodiments and investments. This Special Issue theorises, critiques and extends concepts and discourses of time to examine change and innovation in higher education, re/imaginings of past and future and the emergent and changing forms of pedagogical practice and experience being generated in particular contexts. Adam’s concept of timescapes (1998; 54) is powerful for evoking and extending the imagery of landscapes, enabling an understanding of time as entwined with space, conceptually drawn and constituted experientially. Space-time is deeply relational, contextual and experiential, forming overarching narratives of higher education, its purpose and its future. As these then become in/visibilised and subsumed, in various ways and in different contexts, into hegemonic discourses of individual responsibility and choice, new temporal framings must then be carefully re-negotiated and self-managed by students and teachers. The papers in this Special Issue thus draw on theoretical and empirical contributions to examine intersecting pressures and [im]possibilities across different ‘timescapes’ in higher education. This forthcoming special issue of Teaching in Higher Education will explore higher education in times of change, inviting papers that contribute to understanding how time is conceptualised and/or experienced in higher education, the impact of this on teaching and learning practices and identities and how discourses of the ‘management’ of time and change shapes and constrains policies and imagined possibilities. This call for papers is wide-ranging and the following list of possible questions is intended to be indicative rather than prescriptive – we will consider any contribution addressing issues of time in higher education as they relate to broader pedagogical challenges and uncertainties:
Abstracts should be submitted online here. We expect to inform successful authors in July 2019, with a provisional submission date for full papers of 30th October 2019. The special issue will be published in April 2020. Co-editors: Penny Jane Burke (University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia) and Catherine Manathunga (University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia) Reference Adam B (1998). Timescapes of modernity: the Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge. Chasing Rhythm: Encounters at the Edge of Academic and Epistemological Traditions. International Symposium on Rhythm Margaret St. Lecture room, School of Art, Birmingham City University, Birmingham UK 29.05.2019 9am-5pm This Symposium acknowledges, records and responds to a period of revived interest in the philosophical understandings and methodological affordances of the category of rhythm across a range of subjects and disciplines. The history of the study of rhythm is in itself denoted by a rhythmic cadence, as historian of rhythm, philosopher and social theorist Pascal Michon observes (2016).Michon identifies three fundamental periods of rhythmic renaissance: a first one, in ancient times, coinciding with the so called Hellenization of culture, characterised by a surge in written communication (Eikelboom, 2018). A second one, in modern times, that charted the social, economic and cultural effects of the Industrial Revolution; and a third, contemporary one, that coincides with the intensification of globalization as we are currently experiencing it, but whose origins can be traced back to the twentieth century (Bachelard, 2000; Benveniste, 1966; Meschonnic, 1982). It is the latter that frames and situates the themes explored in this Symposium, allowing us to interrogate the historical, cultural and societal conditions and moods that seem to invite and propel the return of rhythm. In particular, the Symposium aims to introduce novel theoretical and methodological explorations of rhythm within adult education & higher education; sociology; urban studies; cultural-historical research; critical, contextual and media studies. Embracing a variety of theoretical-methodological approaches and moving beyond traditional disciplinary ‘enclosures’, this one-day International Symposium asks four fundamental questions:
Invited Speakers: Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Professor in Adult Learning & Leadership, Columbia University, New York; Psychosociologist & Rhythmanalyst at the Temporalities, Rhythms & Complexity Lab, Sunkhronos Institute, Geneva. Dawn Lyon, Reader in Sociology, University of Kent. Yi Chen, Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies, University of the Arts, London (UAL). Julian Henriques, Director of the Topology Research Unit (TRU), Goldsmiths, London. Film producer, writer-director and sound artist. Sunil Manghani,Professor of Theory, Practice & Critique, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Filip Vostal, Researcher, Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic Conference Convenor Dr. Fadia Dakka, Research Fellow Deputy Director of CSPACE, Birmingham City University Contact: fadia.dakka [at] bcu.ac.uk Register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/international-symposium-on-rhythm-chasing-rhythm-encounters-at-the-edge-of-academic-epistemological-tickets-59947570798 The Slow Research Lab are pleased to announce the next in their series of immersive study experiences, to take place this July 2019 on the coast of the Adriatic Sea.
RESONANT BODIES is an interdisciplinary research program that explores conditions of ‘resonance’ within and between a spectrum of bodies (human and nonhuman) – from the intimate scale of sensory perception to an expanded web of relations, spaces and times. Participants will work intensively and across a range of mediums as they tune into the unique forms and rhythms of the local landscape, unearthing its stories and connecting with the myriad ‘bodies’ that are part of it. At the same time, the research brings awareness to patterns of both struggle and resilience held in our own bodies and histories, illuminating the potential for individual/collective transformation. The program is realized in collaboration with the Sibenik Hub for Ecology, and is co-facilitated by Irena Ateljevic, Siobhán K. Cronin, LaToya Manly-Spain, and Carolyn Strauss. Vocal and somatic experimentation, readings, discussions, Slow walks, swimming, stargazing, an island excursion, and farm-to-table food promise a week of inspiration and deep nourishment. Space is limited to 12 participants. More details about the program, facilitators, and fees are here [link broken] |
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