Announcement on our Second Temporal Belongings Conference

 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 [email protected]

Michelle Bastian, on behalf of the 2nd Temporal Belongings Conference organising team

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