Time is suddenly everywhere in the eyes of humanities scholars and social scientists: in the webs of life that have evolved to maintain life on this planet; in the everyday lives of cab drivers, scientists and calendar software developers; in the stories we turn to in order to understand the present; in histories of growth and expansion; in the timelines, plans, and deadlines defining fundamental stakes of politics. There is growing interest in historiographies of time, ethnographies of time, media theories, social theories and aesthetics of time. But ultimately, why does it matter that time is multiple and ubiquitous?
The Lifetimes project’s concluding conference is dedicated to the issues that arise when we no longer live the same histories, endure the same experiences, follow the same beat, or even conceptualize the times we live in with the same vocabulary, the same timekeeping technologies, or from within the same academic disciplines. We now invite proposals for contributions from anyone working on time. While we will give priority to open or closed panel proposals, individual papers may also be submitted. In recognition of the creative methodologies of the environmental humanities, experimental, experiential, or artistic contributions will also be considered. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
Sophus Bugges hus, University of Oslo and online (let us know if and how you want to participate online). Submission details: Submit your abstract in the submission portal by the 15th of March (23:59 CET). Got any questions? Email us at [email protected]. Full information available from www.hf.uio.no/ikos/forskning/prosjekter/livstider/lifetimes-conference.html Info on the concluding conference for the University of Oslo based Lifetimes project. temporalities.no/
Time is suddenly everywhere in the eyes of humanities scholars and social scientists: in the webs of life that have evolved to maintain life on this planet; in the everyday lives of cab drivers, scientists and calendar software developers; in the stories we turn to in order to understand the present; in histories of growth and expansion; in the timelines, plans, and deadlines defining fundamental stakes of politics. There is growing interest in historiographies of time, ethnographies of time, media theories, social theories and aesthetics of time. But ultimately, why does it matter that time is multiple and ubiquitous? The Lifetimes project’s concluding conference is dedicated to the issues that arise when we no longer live the same histories, endure the same experiences, follow the same beat, or even conceptualize the times we live in with the same vocabulary, the same timekeeping technologies, or from within the same academic disciplines. When: 9-11 August 2023 Where: The University of Oslo (Sophus Bugge's House) and Online What else: In the days preceding the conference, 7-8 August, we'll be organizing a PhD seminar. Keep your eye on our web page for a call for papers after the Christmas break. Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present is a four-year research project funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2019-2023) and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo. The project presents a new way of studying time across the socio-natural divide, using concepts like synchronization, entanglement, materiality, and futurity. Emerging from discussions in postwar theories of history, our framework draws on approaches to time in anthropology, STS, and critical time studies. Time is approached both as part of the real, and as analytical lens, through which we study objects, practices and events. More information to follow. The team behind The Material Life of Time have been working hard in the background reflecting on what lessons to take from the event, and whether our experiments with online conviviality met our aims. We are pleased to announce that the first of two papers on the conference is now available from Geo:Geography and Environment. The paper is open access, so it can be read and downloaded by everyone. More details on the paper just below:
Bastian, M., Flatø, E.H., Baraitser, L., Jordheim, H., Salisbury, L. & van Dooren, T. (2022) ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality. Geo: Geography and Environment, 9, e00114. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.114 Abstract: Geography, like many other disciplines, is reckoning with the carbon intensity of its practices and rethinking how activities such as annual meetings are held. The Climate Action Task Force of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), for example, was set up in 2019 and seeks to transform the annual conference in light of environmental justice concerns. Mirroring shifts in geographic practice across the globe, these efforts point to a need to understand how new opportunities for knowledge production, such as online events, can operate effectively. In this paper, we offer suggestions for best practice in virtual spaces arising from our Material Life of Time conference held in March 2021, a two-day global event that ran synchronously across 15 time zones. Given concerns about lack of opportunities for informal exchanges at virtual conferences, or the ‘coffee break problem’, we designed the event to focus particularly on opportunities for conviviality. This was accomplished through a focus on three key design issues: the spatial, the temporal, and the social. We review previous work on the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous and asynchronous online conference methods and the kinds of geographic communities they might support. We then describe our design approach and reflect on its effectiveness via a variety of feedback materials. We show that our design enabled high delegate satisfaction, a sense of conviviality, and strong connections with new colleagues. However, we also discuss the problems with attendance levels and external commitments that hampered shared time together. We thus call for collective efforts to support the ‘event time’ of online meetings, rather than expectations to fit them around everyday tasks. Even so, our results suggest that synchronous online events need not result in geographical exclusions linked to time-zone differences, and we outline further recommendations for reworking the spacetimes of the conference. ASLE-UKI Biennial Conference: Northumbria 2022
Call for Papers Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, Biennial Conference 2022‘ Epochs, Ages, and Cycles: Time and the Environment’ 6–8 September 2022, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne Plenary Speakers include: Samantha Walton (Bath Spa University) Elizabeth-Jane Burnett (Northumbria University) Northumbria University is delighted to host the 2022 Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland. The purpose of ASLE-UKI is to encourage scholarship, criticism, and appreciation of environmental literature and of the relationship between literature and environment, through activities and publications based in the UK and Ireland. ASLE-UKI welcomes participation by anyone interested in environmental literature and culture—past, present, or future—from anywhere in the world, whether as scholars, readers, or creative writers. For the 2022 conference, we are guided by Edmund Burke’s observation that society is ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Nowhere is this truer than in our relationship with the environment, which is shaped by decisions made by countless generations of hunters, gatherers, farmers, gardeners, builders, miners, and engineers, and where every choice we make today may have profound environmental implications for countless future generations. While papers on any aspect of literature, culture, and environment are welcome, this conference in particular invites contributions that address the theme of ‘Epochs, Ages, and Cycles: Time and the Environment’. Possible areas include, but are not limited to:
The deadline for proposals is Monday 6 June 2022. You will be informed of the outcome of your submission within two weeks from the deadline. If, however, you need an early decision for reasons of travel and/or funding, please indicate this when you submit your proposal and we will endeavour to make a decision within ten working days of your submission. Over the years, the ASLE-UKI conference has developed a reputation for outings, walks, and field trips that explore local environments and environmental issues. Trips at this conference may include a walk along Hadrian’s Wall, a guided tour of Newcastle and the Tyne, a visit to a Northumbrian nature reserve, and a guided tour of Newcastle’s art galleries and museums. There will be wine receptions and a vegetarian conference dinner. More information about events and outings will be published on the conference website early in 2022. The conference is intended to be an in-person event and we have limited facilities for hybrid sessions. In the (we hope unlikely) event of a new Covid outbreak or other issue that makes an in-person conference impossible, we will announce an alternative online conference. Registration will open online by Friday 1 July 2022. We will publish the registration fees early in 2022 on the conference website There will be reduced rates for students and unwaged delegates. All delegates must be a member of ASLE-UKI or an international ASLE affiliate association. Links to international ASLE Affiliates can be found at https://asle.org.uk/membership/ The organisers aim to publish a selection of articles based on the best papers on the conference theme as a special themed issue of Green Letters, the journal of ASLE-UKI. For further information, please contact the conference organiser, Professor Brycchan Carey; [email protected] More info: https://asle.org.uk/events/northumbria-2022/ June 29 - July 1, 2022, Oslo (Hybrid)
19th IMISCOE Annual Conference Migration and Time: Temporalities of Mobility, Governance, and Resistance Migration is intertwined with time in myriad ways and at multiple scales. In individual lives, migration propels change over time and entails engagement with personal pasts and futures. Time and temporalities are structuring migration experiences, when refugees are granted temporary protection, labour migrants are offered temporary employment and rights of residency, and undocumented migrants are living with uncertainties for the future. The governance of migration is also the governance of migrants’ relations to and experiences of time. Governance of migration happens in time – sometimes in the form of rapid changes in times of “crisis”, but perhaps also through postponement when the urgency has passed. Attention to time and temporalities illuminates processes of othering and patterns of inequalities, as well as forms of resistance and adaptations to policies and institutions. The rapid changes in laws, regulations, policies and practices of migration also have repercussions on the topics, theoretical approaches, and methodologies of migration scholars. These and other perspectives on time and migration have flourished as part of the emerging ‘temporal turn’ in migration studies. The theme ‘migration and time’ brings out disciplinary, methodological and theoretical diversity of migration research with a shared focus. https://www.imiscoe.org/events/imiscoe-events/1380-19th-imiscoe-annual-conference Time & Society Special forum section: Call for submissions
Teaching Time Edited by Michelle Bastian and Keri Facer The study of time has always had to deal with the fact that it has no easy disciplinary home. Each discipline may have its own take – with the sociology, anthropology and philosophy of time all being well-established. But what has often characterised an interest in time is the relentless pull to inter- and multi-disciplinary ways of working. Much has been written about the theories and methods appropriate to this wide-ranging field, not least in the pages of Time & Society which has championed integrative approaches in particular. To our knowledge, however, very little has been made available about the specific pedagogies that time scholars have developed for university students and new scholars beginning their studies in this complex and definition-defying area of research. How do we go about teaching time? A careful search of the literature reveals strong research interest in temporality as a core element of educational practice. There is the extensive work which unpacks the traditional temporalities of education itself (eg Franch and De Souza 2015; Duncheon and Tierney 2013, Hohti 2016), as well as the time pressures of teaching and how they affect pedagogy (eg Gravesen and Ringskou 2017). Here we see time in its disciplinary mode within education (cf Alhadeff-Jones 2017). At the same time, we are beginning to see the use of critical theories of time for challenging and redesigning dominant educational temporalities. Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman (2019), for example, turn to work on counterfuturism and queer temporalities to rethink outcomes-based models of teaching in primary and secondary education. Queer temporalities research has been drawn on for theorising a ‘pedagogy of vulnerability’ (Shelton and Melchoir 2019). Crip time has been used as a framework for redesigning college composition classes in the US (Wood 2017), as has Afrofuturism (Grue 2019). Theories of anticipation have been used to reflect on ways that models of the future are passed on in problematic ways (Amsler and Facer 2017a). Indigenous and decolonial scholarship is also inviting critical attention to temporality as part of pedagogic practice in universities and schools. This includes the re-introduction of deep time practices of learning in and with place from Dharug communities in Australia, to the adoption of intergenerational story-telling pedagogies in Sami Communities (Lopez Lopez & Coello, 2021; Jensen, 2020). Work here also includes the inter-species pedagogies of the Common-Worlds research collective (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Kummen 2016), as well as strategies from indigenous and futures studies for connecting learning with place cross the ‘long now’ (Wooltorton et al, 2020). Even so, there are fewer guides for understanding how theories and methods of time studies might be taught – in other words, for understanding the pedagogies that can build understanding of the sorts of theoretical developments, methodologies and canonical texts that have emerged over the 30 years since Time & Society was founded. How are the next generation of scholars in this field being trained and developed? There are contributions such as Jacqueline Ellis and Jason D. Martinek’s (2018) article on teaching Afrofuturism and examples of research on teaching futures studies, eg Berg 2018, including special issues devoted to the topic (Amsler and Facer 2017b). And yet, while there are undoubtedly many cross-overs between studies of anticipation and futures, our interest in this CFP is in addressing the key gap in published literature on the question of teaching time studies and critical time studies (Huebener 2015). As a result, we are inviting contributions to an ongoing forum section on Teaching Time throughout our 30th anniversary year. We are inviting both well-known and emerging scholars to share their reflections on the delivery methods, strategies, course design and assessment methods that they have employed to explore time with their students, including how time is conceptualised in this pedagogical work. We would love to hear about all related issues, for example, the innovative assignments that have worked well and might be adopted by others; how a time studies ‘canon’ is created, challenged and transformed; approaches for introducing a field to students who may never have thought about time since they were taught to read a clock in early childhood (Birth 2017: x-xi); or how students been enabled to provincialize their own temporal understandings and put them into dialogue with others. What hasn’t worked, or what risks have been uncovered in your teaching approaches? What methods have been used to collect evidence that these methods are working as hoped? Also welcome are reflections on institutional issues such as where these courses best sit, how students are attracted and what support might be developed for wider education in time studies. Finally, we also invite work that troubles the framing we have set up here and pushes us to think otherwise. Put more succinctly questions these forum contributions may address include: • How are scholars supporting the training and development of postgraduate students in time studies? • What is the nature of the canon that is being created to teach time studies and what are its limitations and potential areas for future development? • What forms of pedagogic practice are being developed to nurture temporal reflexivity? • How is the teaching of time studies being mediated – what tools, materials and resources are being used? Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis for publication in our 2022 issues (last submission by 1 August 2022) and will be reviewed by Michelle Bastian and Keri Facer. Suggested word limits are around 2000-4000 words and we recommend that those interested in submitting contact us first ( michelle.bastian [at] ed.ac.uk or Keri.Facer [at] bristol.ac.uk ) with a short query to see if the topic is a good fit for the section. Bibliography
The Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society have been running many exciting events looking at how research on time use could be better integrated into policy decisions, and society more widely. Two great events happening next month include their Time Use Week and the 43rd International Association for Time Use Research Conference. Click the links to sign up for online events and find out more about what the group have been up to.
Specific temporalities: territorial futures between practices and knowlewdge
Organized by the 'collettivo epidemia'. https://www.siacantropologia.it/p27/ The panel aims to explore the capacities for adaptation, recognition and negotiation between collectives and the landscape (especially with the entities that inhabit it). As Gramsci reminds us – moments of crisis facilitate the death of the old but slow the arrival of the new. Within the relationship between interpretation of environmental transformations and processes of territorialization, we are interested in exploring practices of constructing possible futures, particularly those underlying the understanding of new symbolic values of the territory that include non-human entities within the perspectives of more-than-human worlds (Papadopoulos 2018). EXPERIENCES OF TIME First and foremost, we deem essential investigations that focus on the lived and embodied experience of time (Lefebrve 2004), guided by an approach that looks to the future as ‘present future’, that is, rooted in the present as a poietic even more than symbolic dimension. In other words, we are not asked only to think or reflect on the future, but to do so through those practices that in the present, according to Mandich, are reconnected to the concept of ‘practical anticipation’, understood as the ordinary experience of concern and immersion in what’s forth-coming (Bourdieu 1997). MULTITEMPORALITY We also consider of particular interest the community experiences that through practices implement a reconfiguration of the relationship between humans and non-humans (understood as the ‘relationship of care’ described by Maria Pluig de la Bellacasa), advocating for a resemantization of the relationship between value and economic nature. We are interested in exploring how the inclusiveness of non-humans within the imaginative and aspirational capacity of territorial realities passes through practice, capable of disrupting anthropocentric visions of the future. This means bringing attention to the “temporal rhythms of more-than-human worlds,” focusing on the imagination and materialization of futures that “are obscured or marginalized as unproductive in the dominant futuristic thrust.” COLLECTIVE PATHS OF KNOWLEDGE As well as material practices, knowledge in the making can guide a process of reterritorialization that has a symbiotic relationship with non-humans.While the most recent perspectives of academic relevance (more-than-human ontologies, human-soil relations and politics of care) may be the focus of this discussion, reflecting on future projections regarding knowledge means questioning in particular the ways in which ‘oracular power’ (Mcgoey 2019, 2021). is produced -that is, how non-humans can counteract the phenomena of strategic ignorance imposed by technoscientific forms of hegemony. The panel accepts presentations and perspectives from research -also in progress- that investigate the future as an outcome of thinking-with nonhuman entities, through practices and through knowledge, in the way that eco-ethical obligations in the Anthropocene call for an intensification of engagement in the making of time for specific temporalities (Bonifacio and Vianello 2020). 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 [email protected], 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 [email protected]. 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/ |
Announcements
New article published reflecting on our online conference, and how we designed for conviviality.
What's this?
Our curated listing of events and news related to time, temporality and social life. Archives
January 2023
Categories
All
|