Temporalities of urban natures: imaginaries, narratives, and practices
 Workshop Series 2021-22
 Organisers:  Lucilla Barchetta (Università Iuav di Venezia) & Mathilda Rosengren (Malmö Universitet)
 
Keynote speakers: Bianca Maria Rinaldi (Politecnico di Torino); Henriette Steiner (Københavns Universitet); Sandra Jasper (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
 
The search for viable avenues for multispecies coexistence is fast becoming a defining feature of the Anthropocene. Only in the past year, the concurrent emergencies of climate change and SARSCov2 have underscored the intimate relations between human-shaped environments and the disastrous deterioration of once thriving ecosystems. As such, more-than-human appropriations of urban space illuminate both complex challenges and potential solutions to a sustainable co-existing in the Anthropocene city.
 
In this context, the workshop series seeks to explore how different temporal entanglements structure, affect, and co-produce urban landscapes of the Anthropocene city through three overlapping thematic approaches (narratives, imaginaries, and practices). 
 
We invite urban nature scholars across the social sciences, the humanities, and the fields of arts and architecture – with a regional expertise on Northern Italy, the Öresund region, or Eastern Germany – to reflect on the temporalities of urban nature over the course of three connected workshops in Venice (Università Iuav di Venezia), Malmö (Malmö Universitet), and Berlin (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) respectively. We particularly encourage submissions that display strong empirical engagements with the regions in question. 
 
Each workshop will be run in a hybrid format (in person and online) to accommodate for potential travel and gathering restrictions caused by the pandemic. In the spirit of building and maintaining conversations around the series, papers will be selected according to both the relevance of the proposed topic and the applicant’s capacity to participate in each of the three workshops (online or in person). The whole series will be held in English.
 
Please send an abstract (300 words maximum plus 3 keywords) and a short bio (100 words maximum) to urban.nature.temporalities@gmail.com, by the 15 June 2021, stating which workshop you wish to present at (Venice, Malmö, or Berlin) and if you foresee any challenges in attending any of the workshop sessions (whether in person or online).
 
For the full CfP and workshop thematic and structure visit our website: https://urban-nature-temporalities.com/
Direct any queries to urban.nature.temporalities@gmail.com.
 
The workshop has been made possible by a Seminar Series Award from the Urban Studies Foundation (read more about it here).
 
Key dates:
Abstract deadline: 15 June 2021
Notifications of abstract proposals: 2 July 2021
1st workshop: Venice - 23-24 September 2021
2nd workshop: Malmö - 25-26 March 2022
3rd workshop: Berlin - 24-25 June 2022

This year Loughborough University will be hosting a series of interdisciplinary events exploring time and temporality, which begin with a virtual forum entitled 'Spacetime and Chronotope – How Disciplines Conceptualise Time' on Friday 27th November, 2.30-5pm. To mark this, Radar - the University's contemporary art programme - has commissioned a unique virtual performance of the time-based work 'An Hour' by Alison Ballard and Martin Lewis, from 12.45-2.15pm.

Details on the workshop can be found at: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias/news-events/events/2020/nov/iastimethemelaunch/

Details on 'An Hour' can be found at: https://radar.lboro.ac.uk/events/an-hour/

Call for Contributions to a Special Issue of Early Popular Visual Culture (Taylor & Francis):
“Representing and Seeing Time Before 1930”
 
Just as it is clear that temporalities are historically contingent and socially and culturally constructed, it is also clear that time has taken different guises in the past and particularly in popular visual culture. Although scholars differ in dating the origins of popular visual culture, much of its development coincided with epochal transformations in timekeeping and time awareness itself. From roughly the eighteenth century onward, the form and content of widely circulated, often mechanically reproduced, images and objects reflected a growing global preoccupation with clock time, deep geological time, historical time, and other temporal modes. While scholars of early popular visual culture have examined the ways in which specific media have embodied and represented new ideas and practices of time, the same question is asked more rarely of popular visual culture before 1930. To what extent were the temporal manipulations of photography and cinema enmeshed or reflect in less quintessentially “modern” media such as engravings and theatre? What was the effect on visual culture of the increasing ubiquity, mechanization, and standardization of time prior to high modernism in the arts and the discovery of relativity in the sciences? Did it register as presence or absence, or a mixture of the two in popular visual culture? How was time re-imagined, produced, and consumed in museums, popular magazines, vaudeville theatres, advertisements, and other popular media? What was the effect on coalescing temporal modalities of increasingly ubiquitous forms of popular visual culture?
 
The peer-reviewed journal Early Popular Visual Culture seeks original research contributions on these and related questions for an interdisciplinary special issue, “Representing and Seeing Time Before 1930,” to be edited by Justin T. Clark (Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University) and Alexis McCrossen (Professor of History, Southern Methodist University). Potential topics include, but are by no means limited to: time-notation in print and material culture (e.g. illustrated calendars, almanacs, and holiday cards); representations and exhibitions of natural history and antiquity; mechanical timekeeping and its artifacts; images of urban and environmental transformation; visual memorials and commemorations; representations of death and dying; instantaneity and non-instantaneity in photography and other media; serial or non-linear visual narratives (theater, film, comics, etc.); techniques of temporal representation across media; speculative visualizations of time travel and the future; and depictions of aging and the life cycle.
 
Prospective contributors should submit abstracts of 250-500 words to https://bit.ly/2SIqSXa before January 15, 2021. Illustrations are encouraged. Drafts of 5,000-10,000 words will be due in August 2021, and publication is tentatively scheduled for August 2022.

Justin Tyler Clark, Assistant Professor of History, Nanyang Technological University
Alexis McCrossen, Professor of History, Southern Methodist University

WAIT - Waiting for an uncertain future: the temporalities of irregular migration

The WAIT project has focused on the temporal aspects of migration and investigated how temporal structures related to irregular migration are shaped by legal regimes, cultural norms and power relationships, and how they shape subjective experiences and life projects. The project adds a temporal perspective to dominant spatial approaches in migration studies, and advances theories of temporality in the humanities and social sciences. Waiting has been scrutinized ethnographically in four European migration-hubs: Oslo, Stockholm, Marseille, and Hamburg, and analytically through targeted theoretical tasks. Waiting as an analytical perspective offers new insights into the complex and shifting nature of processes of bordering, belonging, state power, exclusion and inclusion, and social relations in irregular migration. The conference will be held on the platform Zoom, and it's now possible to register your participation.

At the closing conference, core researchers and network partners present their research. Speakers include: Bridget Anderson, Nicholas De Genova, Kari Anne Klovholt Drangsland, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Randi Gressgård, Christine Jacobsen, Helge Jordheim, Marry-Anne Karlsen, Shahram Khosravi, Odin Lysaker, Sandrine Musso, Gregor Noll, Jessica Schultz, Jo Vearey, Sarah Willen, Katerina Rozakou, Johannes Machinya and Frode Eick.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE PROGRAMME AND REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE

 Mobility, Time & Political Possibility
Deconstructed diasporic workshop
 
Convened by:
Noora Lori
Boston University
Anne McNevin
New School for Social Research
Loren B Landau
University of Oxford & Witwatersrand

Mobility, Time and Political Possibilities is a year-long virtual writing workshop running from early 2021 and culminating in an in-person even in early 2022. We envisage a small, but committed group of scholars meeting monthly, in camera, to share and critically engage each other’s work-in-progress, on a rotating basis. Our aim is to produce a provocative interdisciplinary edited volume or special issue, via a collaborative and iterative process.
 
The regulation of human mobility via the use of time has attracted much recent scholarly attention. Much of this work is concerned with waiting, stoppage, deferral and delay as disciplinary techniques or by-product. Rarely is time and its manipulation framed as a form of elusion or liberation. Less often still, is the time at stake in these techniques, itself submitted to critical inquiry. Does waiting, for example, imply an interruption, and sometimes a form of injustice, only because of assumptions about the progressive direction in which time is expected to flow? Distinguishing specific measures of time from the notion of temporalities – that is, ways of knowing and ordering time - opens up a larger set of questions about space-time parameters according to which mobilities are governed, and futures are imagined and desired. How might processual, quantum, Indigenous or other ways of conceptualizing time be brought to bear on thinking about mobility and its horizons?
 
Our intention is not to produce an almanac of the miserable: a series of studies into forms of waiting or frustrated futures manifested across the globe. Rather, it is to consider how temporal forms of exclusion, alienation, marginalisation and manipulation underlie governance –broadly conceived – and open possibilities for transforming political futures.
 
On one hand, we are interested in the imbrication of time and temporality with mechanisms for racialisation, spatialization, expropriation, displacement and extraction. This includes attending to how states deploy time (and its miscounting) to police national boundaries by developing legal manoeuvres that separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law. By pegging rights to specific legal statuses, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or (conversely) hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizen residents The politically strategic use of time is not only about control of mobility per se, but also about naming, categorizing, and emplacing in temporal terms (as advanced or backwards, primitive, or modern for example). On the other hand, we want to consider how time and temporality intersect with resistance, critique and the cultivation of alternative political formations, including modes of hospitality and welcome, political community, and justice.
 
How do plural temporalities provide new reference points from which to examine the forms of power at stake in questions of mobility and from which to signal other kinds of mobile aspirations beyond integration into progressive/developmental futures. If time is a discipline, what forms of ill-discipline do multi-temporalities create? How might they operate as forms of intentional or de facto resistance, deploying, what Lefebvre calls polyrhythmicity that makes governing more difficult? Or that generates what Deleuze and Guattari label ‘nomadic power’? How do varied spatio-temporal conceptions of the political present open or curtail the possibility of collective mobilization? What subjects emerge at these points of intersection and disjuncture? What kinds of maps might be drawn to capture the intersection of space, time and mobility imagined and experienced in other ways? What visual and aesthetic vocabularies might be deployed for the same purpose? What histories might inform this openness to temporalities in play? What methodologies are needed to investigate them? Where, when and how do we focus our inquiries?
 
The goal is a collection that is both conceptually and methodologically provocative: outlining new themes, approaches, and considerations for the socio-spatial and political study of human mobility.
 
Those interested in participating are requested to submit a 500-750 word abstract by 19 October 2020. A committee will assess the abstracts and provide potential participants additional details in early November 2020. As an interdisciplinary workshop, we welcome participants from across the social sciences working from all methodological and theoretical perspectives. We particularly encourage submissions from emerging scholars and people working in and on sites outside Europe and North America.
 
All abstracts and queries should be sent to temporality@migration.org.za

Call for Papers
International Society for the Study of Time (ISST)
Eighteenth Triennial Conference
June 26-July 1, 2022 / Yamaguchi, Japan

Time and Measure

Proposals (300 words) due by August 15, 2021

The ISST, renowned for its interdisciplinary scope, invites scientists, scholars, artists and
practitioners to explore questions concerning Time and Measure at its 18th Triennial Conference
to be held in collaboration with the Research Institute of Time Studies (RITS) at Yamaguchi
University in South-Western Japan. Our format of plenary presentations delivered over four days
creates a sustained discussion among participants. We thus expect participants to register for the
entirety of the conference. We shall take a day off mid-conference and provide participants a
choice of time-related excursions in the Yamaguchi area, the site of crucial events at various
turning points in Japanese history .

Because of worldwide uncertainty brought about by the pandemic, we shall be considering
whether and how we may allow for online conference participation. Further information will
follow.

For its 2022 Triennial, the ISST wishes to instigate discussion of all the kinds of temporal
measure—both quantitative and qualitative—which are the work of our different professional
disciplines and some of which may also prove to be cross-disciplinary. When asked about time
and its measure, most people would think of clocks: an even progression of numbers. This view
goes back to Aristotle’s definition of time (in Physics IV) as “the count [arithmos] of changing in
respect of before and after.” As recent events have made us aware, however, times of crisis may
require other measures. Political crises or a crisis like the pandemic seem to impose their own
measure of time. Crisis thus throws into relief the fact that not all times are equal—something
that musicians, strategists and physicians have always known; these professionals and others
have had to develop their own systems of taking time’s measure–some dependent on clocks,
some not.

Suggested Topics

• In what (different/new) ways do physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, archeologists, engineers and other scientists take the measure of things in time?
• How truth-bearing and/or enduring are various measurements?
• What about ‘probabilistic’ measurements of quantum states?
• Can time and space be measured in the same sense?
• When do quantitative differences become qualitative?
• Are lightyears comparable to nanoseconds?
• Is time (exclusively) defined by its measure?
• How do social scientists generate a metric of temporality? Are statistical measures more or less basic than positive ones?
• How does temporal measure relate to ethical decisions? Are there reliable measures for ethical choices in the instant moment and/or over a human lifetime?
• In what ways do we measure the function of ‘tempi’ in music, poetry, theatre performance, dance and film? How are measures of time involved in the visual arts?
• How does temporal mensuration enter or shape narrative discourses in literature?
• We measure chronologies pretty well. But by what means do we measure the kind of time that is a kairos?
• How do crises (e.g., political crisis, catastrophic climate change, the pandemic) impact the
• measurement of time?

Other Suggested Topics:
--time, measure, money and generosity
--history as the measure or mismeasure of time
--the measurement of public vs individual time
--tense/aspect, mood, person and voice in languages
--measurement as determining our understanding of the measured
--the limits of measuring time
--cosmic clocks

Guidelines/Timeline for Proposals
Proposals will be for 20-minute presentations in diverse formats: scholarly paper, debate, performance, overview of creative work, installation, workshop. Proposals for interdisciplinary panels are especially welcome. (Each paper for a panel must be approved by the selection committee.) All work will be presented in English and should strike a balance between expertise in an area of specialization and accessibility to a general intellectual audience. Proposals, no more than 300 words in length, are submitted electronically. The author’s or authors’ name(s) should not appear in the proposal as the ISST does blind reviewing in selecting papers for its conferences. The deadline for submission is August 15,
2021, with acceptances communicated by December 15, 2021. The Society also seeks session
chairs, whose names will be included on the printed conference program.

http://www.studyoftime.org/News.aspx?ID=35

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our next Temporal Belongings conference - The Material Life of Time, which will be taking place on the 15th-17th March 2021.  You can find full details of the call, including information on how to submit here.

As part of sharing our thinking and development work as we plan our next conference, Michelle Bastian has written up our thoughts about timetabling a synchronous online conference, and how we came up with the proposed schedule shown below.

Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy
 
Transdisciplinary Conference
13 – 15 November 2020, University of Dundee
 
Keynotes: Karen Barad, Franco Berardi, Xin Wei Sha, Vladimir Tasić
 
The future is no longer seen as open. It’s seen as precarious on the one hand, and technologically over-determined on the other. Economic uncertainty, the rise of the risk society, the culture of fear and neoliberal necropolitics are seen as a serious threat. The risk society attributes all hazards to human decisions; the culture of fear cultivates the tendency to catastrophise; neoliberal necropolitics welds technology to the exploitation of natural and social reserves in an irreversible way. Amidst the general climate of ‘instrumentarianism’ (Zuboff 2019), paradoxes like ‘the cancelled future’ (Berardi 2014) or ‘automated deregulation’ (Steyerl 2019) are synonymous with permanent crisis, disorder, and the 'end of free will' (Han 2017).
 
Indeterminacy – often associated with but not identical to unknowability and liminality – doesn’t merely defy the ‘order-disorder’, ‘certainty-uncertainty’ binary creating a ‘both-and’ and ‘neither-nor’ space in which a cat can be both dead and alive, as in Schrödinger’s experiment. Indeterminacy is a self-perpetuating dynamic of change with no spatial or temporal constancy – a vibrant multiplicity of parallel potentialities and realities. Initially derived from Bohr’s quantum indeterminacy, Gödel's undecidability, and Stengers and Prirogine's non-linear dynamics, indeterminacy upsets stable structures and ossified power regimes which is why it was embraced as a liberating epistemic force by many 20th century artists and theorists: Jarry, Boulez, Cage, Ichinayagi, Situationists International, Xenakis, Fluxus, Knowbotic Research, Derrida, Guattari, Hayles, Varela and Latour, to mention but a few.
In the digital age, in accelerated, informational capitalism, the situation is very different. First, permanent change is the rule. Second, art, culture, and (bio)politics are no longer separate; they are fused in the infosphere. Consisting of datification, algorithmic predetermination, cultural production, symbolic and affective regimes, the infosphere has modified the language of thought and action. It has also modified the structure of reality. The aim of this transdisciplinary conference is to evaluate the current and future epistemic and ontological potential of spatio-temporal, cultural-mnemonic and socio-political forms of indeterminacy. To this end, we ask questions such as:

• How do contemporary digital thinking-making practices articulate the relationship between design and chance, system and impulse, repeatability and irreversibility, rule, iteration and variability?
• How does temporal indeterminacy, as defined by quantum physics, relate to indigenous conceptions of space-time and matter? (Barad 2018)
• How do ‘an-archives’ – heaps of disparate, perpetually multiplied images (Hansen 2011) – pattern cultural memory?
• What are the repercussions of medial efficacy – the fact that algorithms are not mathematical ideas imposed on concrete data, as is often thought, but diagrams that emerge from repetition and the processual organisation of space-time, objects and actions?  
• What is the relationship between indeterminacy and neuroplasticity, our embodied and extended brains/minds’ adaptability to new perceptual milieus? (Malabou 2006)
• How do deterministic technical milieus and the growing mass of unstructured data configure #datapolitik – a set of operations that regulate space-time through the cybernetic feedback loop, tracking, capture, and feelings of safety or threat? (Panagia 2017)

 
We invite proposals for 20 min papers, provocations, creative contributions, re-enactments of scientific experiments and proposals for curated panels from the fields of art, media (theory), physics, mathematics, philosophy, cultural studies, memory studies, digital humanities, and anthropology. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Indeterminate (historical or contemporary) artistic methodologies, e.g. convolutions, destinerrance, obfuscation, culture jamming, databending
• Aleatory composition in music, event scores, performance and psychogeography
• Indeterminacy, observation and measurement
• Entangled (virtual or material) patternings and the collapse of micro-macro, general-specific perspectives
• Superposition and multiple spatio-temporal histories
• The role of repetition, velocity and scale in machine learning and algorithmic ‘promiscuity’
• Computers as inherently re-iterative, indeterminate machines
• Logical aberrations in AI classificatory systems, e.g. those used in affective computing
• Errors/slippages in deterministic technologies (e.g. biometrics or facial recognition software) and their relationship to judgment and digital inscription
• Retroversion and the ambiguity of meaning in digital and legal discourse
• Big data and the indeterminacy of inference
• Glitch and the draining of cultural memory or erasure as tracing
• Indeterminacy and the technological unconscious
• Digital grammatisation of existence (Stiegler) and critical, micro-context-responsive computing
• Posthumanist performativity (Barad)
• The indeterminacy of waste in ecology, topology and anthropology
• Indeterminacy and social identity (e.g. gender)
• The dynamics of liminality as a space-time of transformation
• The history of indeterminacy in physics, mathematics and philosophy
• Indeterminacy as ethics and aesthetics

 
Panel proposal deadline: 20 April 2020 (1000 w proposal + 450 speaker bios)
Individual presentation deadline: 1 May 2020 (350 w abstract + 150 bio) NEW DUE DATE 15th JUNE.
Notification of Acceptance: 10 May 2020
Please email abstracts with ‘Indeterminacy Conference’ in the subject to indeterminacy@dundee.ac.uk
This conference is hosted by the AHRC-funded project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Biopolitics.

We are pleased to annouce that papers arising from our 2018 Temporal Belongings conference The Social Life of Time are now out in Time & Society. See a wonderful selection of papers including Charles W. Mills keynote "The chronopolitics of racial time".

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The social life of time
Michelle Bastian , Lisa Baraitser , Michael J Flexer , Andrew R Hom and Laura Salisbury

The chronopolitics of racial time
Charles W Mills

Waiting as a redemptive state: The ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ and the offer from the Hamburg
government
Kari Anne K Drangsland

Jaffa’s times: Temporalities of dispossession and the advent of natives’ reclaimed time
Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem

The Trump administration’s politics of time: The temporal dynamics that enable Trump’s interests to
determine American foreign policy
Christopher McIntosh

Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault
Jürgen Portschy

Seizure aesthetics: Temporal regimes and medical technology in epilepsy diagnosis
Megh Marathe

The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’: Psychosis and a (non)sense of time
Michael J Flexer

The secret of quick thinking: The invention of mental speed in America, 1890–1925
Justin Tyler Clark

No time to waste – How the social practices of temporal organisation change in the transition from
work to retirement
Anna Wanka

From Combahee resistance to the Confederate : Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy
Tanya Ann Kennedy

Thinking about the meaning of time among temporary labor migrants in Israel
Robin A Harper and Hani Zubida

Ruins of pre-gentrification: Schrotthäuser and urban standstill in a postindustrial city
Felix Ringel

Time as a source of struggle and resilience in homeless families
Peter Fraenkel

The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures
Ella Harris and Rebecca Coleman