In addition to being a theme four member within CRESC I have also been involved in a group exploring issues of spacing, timing and organizing since 1999. This group has a keen interest in how ideas of repetition and difference and stability and change are conceptualised and in recent years there has been more of an emphasis on ideas of images and signs in relation to space and time. In particular, I am interested in how we understand intensities, affect, assemblages and acts of engagement with regards to the process and practices of organizing. My empirical research has been conducted within mental health care in order to explore certain information practices, standards and forms of organizing, as well as a national newspaper printing factory.

I am a social historian based at CRESC with interests in the British working class, memory studies and the history of social research. I am particularly interested in the intersections between class, gender, life-cycle and individual socio-spatial trajectories, and wider cultural representations of place in understanding the ways in which memories of particular communities are articulated. In recent work I have been looking at the roles of slum clearance, residualisation and stigmatization in popular understandings of ‘community’ and social change in working class neighbourhoods in England. I have argued that assertions that social and spatial dislocations produced by slum clearance and social mobility produced nostalgia for the old communities are insufficiently nuanced. I have argued that such narratives may be more fruitfully understood as the product of a radical attempt to recover working class experience, which contested dominant representations of the working class as deficient. However, I’m now wondering if this is sufficient. I’ve recently been reading around ‘transactive’ remembering and thinking about how particular audiences shape what gets told. This is perhaps a key missing element in my analysis of community publishing. The relationship between time and community is another important element in shaping social scientific readings/social policy in the post-war period. I am thinking particularly about assertions of ‘traditional’ patterns of working class family life and understandings of lifestyles or environments which seem ‘out-moded.’ Particular (mis)understandings of time and community also seem to have informed area-based regeneration initiatives such as the New Deal for Communities.

I am currently a 2nd year PhD student in International Politics at Aberystwyth University. Prior to this, I lived for a long time and studied occasionally in Lawrence, Kansas, a mid-sized university town where my interest in time first emerged (although had I been paying closer attention, it could easily have sparked an interest in community as well). My research builds on this interest, and I am generally intrigued by all things time (philosophy, sociology, history of—in particular if anyone can explicate a mechanical clock escapement...), and a few specific things about community such as political, phenomenological, and identity facets. My hopes for the workshop are to 1) be part of a broad interdisciplinary discussion about time, and 2) to develop tools to pursue an inquiry of the relationship between time and community. With regard to the latter, I am particularly concerned with whether the following hunches are plausible: 1) that communities self-constitute in and against time, and 2) that they are (often/always?) political projects which depend on some disciplining or taming of a Western concept of time.

I am an archaeologist employed by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. We are a non- departmental government body in Scotland and we help to survey, record, interpret and present the historic environment of Scotland and an AHRC IRO. I studied Geography and Archaeology at Manchester University and then Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. I am currently undertaking a research review as part of the AHRC Connected Communities programme, entitled ‘Linking Communities to Historic Environments', which looks at how organisations like ourselves and others engages with communities through the historic environment. My approach to the topic of the workshop is simple; if it wasn’t for time I would not be here. Time is what my job is about, it forms the core of my research and is measured in archaeological time, through people’s actions and remains.

I lecture in geography at the Open University. I have a long term interest in environmental issues that has gradually morphed into a concern with earth processes – and the question of how to live as best we can on an inherently volatile planet. My take on community always involves a working across difference, and I’m interested in the way that the dynamics of the earth are amongst the things that can make us different – or cause estrangement. Just as there is a great deal of mobility across the surface of the earth, I like to think about the way different groups or communities have made it through long and often turbulent environmental histories as a kind of journey through time. So that we might come to see all communities, one way or another, as bearing the trace of their tussles with a changeable earth, stretching all the way back into  deep, geological time. But I’m also drawn to the very mundane, ordinary ways that people help each other in times of crisis. Put these two themes together, and I think there’s potential for rethinking community for times of rapid climate change – especially as we encounter 'others’ whose lives have been thrown off course by environmental stresses. So I’m interested in exploring ideas about how notions of belonging and hospitality towards others might be enlivened by a stronger sense of the way every community is always already a kind of sedimented set of struggles with earthly volatility. My talk is titled Community and the Time of the Earth: from Katrina to Climate Change

My interest in the themes of the workshop is ethnographic and comparative. My first book involved a community – strongly self-identified as such – in the southern USA, where the temporal idioms of progress and salvation played against each other as rationales for personal choice and community development. The intricate intertwining of secular and sacred discourses of time (and eternity) in that project became the theme of subsequent work -- a comparative ethnographic account of local ideas of community, in collaboration with David Engel and Barbara Yngvesson (Law and Community in Three American Towns [1994]), and in a book on the anthropology of time (A Moment’s Notice [1996]).  In the latter work, my focus was on what Emile Durkheim called social time – both as a sign of divergent constructions of agency (within social science), and as a repertoire of political symbols (in contested states). My interest in the relationship of ethnographic and political discourses of community and democracy has continued (in edited volumes:  Ethnography and Democracy [1998], Ethnography in Unstable Places [edited with E. Mertz and K. Warren, 2002], and Ethnographies of Neoliberalism [2009]).  And meanwhile, U.S. social policy highlights emergent stakes in the politics of time (mainly through markets and counter-terrorism) in relation to larger questions of solidarity and belonging (The Paradox of Relevance [2011]). My presentation for the workshop takes up some of those terms – drawn from legislation affecting civil rights, welfare, immigration and deportation.  The title for my remarks is:  Time In, Time Out, Time’s Up:  Regulating the Temporality of Inclusion and Exclusion. I very much look forward to the workshop.