I am a lecturer in political theory at the University of Leeds. My own research has focused on the problem of account for political community in conditions of moral and cultural diversity and conflict. To engage with this problem, I’ve tried in my work to elaborate a ‘narrative conception’ of community that conceives of communities as temporally extended shared lives that conform to different sorts of narrative patterns. I hope that the workshop will help me to broaden my sense of the connections between community and time and further to problematize the approach I’ve hitherto deployed.

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.