CFP: Time as infrastructure

Call for papers
Time as infrastructure: For an analysis of contemporary urbanization
Editors: Dr. Natalia Besedovsky, University of Hamburg; Fritz-Julius Grafe, Humboldt University Berlin; Dr. Hanna Hilbrandt, HafenCity University Hamburg; Hannes Langguth, Technical University Berlin
 
We are looking for papers to be published as part of a Special Issue planned for “City. Analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action”
Different and partly contradictory tendencies in describing present notions of time reflect the multiplicity of temporal experiences in contemporary urban life. Especially throughout the Western world, authors describe the acceleration of everyday experiences through demands of interactivity, multitasking, and hyper-solicitation as processes of social alienation in the course of rapid technological and socio-economic change. However, experiences of uncertainty, stagnation, insecurity, and waiting challenge these narratives of acceleration under late capitalism. The precarity of large segments of the job market, the uncertainty of residence rights for refugees and asylum seekers, the struggle to balance work and life, or the increasing marginalization of communities that lack basic infrastructures can be seen as cases in point.
This Special Issue debates the social and political implications of such temporal dynamics for our cities and everyday urban life. In doing so, it explores the making and constitution of temporalities, the power relations in and through which these processes are embedded, the inequalities that their effects entail, as well as potentials for socio-political change. To unveil the manifold structures and practices that underlie the making of temporal dynamics, it probes the concept of infrastructure. Considering time through the analytical lens of infrastructure promises to elucidate the ways in which political, social, and economic conditions shape and exert authority over the everyday urban. Temporalities, as we see it, themselves constitute infrastructures: As structures that underlie and powerfully shape current forms of organization and interaction, considering temporalities through the analytics of an infrastructural perspective facilitates an understanding of their making and effects. An infrastructural perspective allows us to unpack struggles around the making of temporalities, their use as modalities of domination and resistance as well as resultant inequalities. In sum, this Special Issue advances three aims: to strengthen and enrich the analytical notion of infrastructure through disentangling and understanding urban temporalities; to facilitate and politicize knowledge about the construction of urban temporalities and thus the present time; and to unveil potential starting points for social and political interventions that aim to develop alternative future conditions and modes of urban coexistence.
 
Call for papers
We welcome submissions of abstracts (~500 words) for empirical papers (between 4,000 and 8,000 words) that unveil the political moments of time as infrastructure. Topics include but are not limited to:

• Infrastructures of acceleration, waiting, limbo or stagnation
• Contradictions between temporal structures: frictions and tensions in urban rhythms, cycles or synchronization processes
• Temporal domination through capitalist or state infrastructures or the entanglement of both
• Practices of resistance / political activism that aim at appropriating or disrupting temporal regimes
• Physical, social, financial, environmental infrastructures (e.g. infrastructures of water supply, computer trading, urban transport etc.) and their temporal implications

We particularly encourage comparative work and post-colonial as well as southern perspectives.
Deadline for abstract submissions is September 1st 2017. Please send the abstract to Hanna Hilbrandt at [email protected]. If you have any queries or would like to see the extended CfP, please don´t hesitate to email. Full paper submission is due by January 15th.
 
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Dr. Hanna Hilbrandt
 
Geschichte und Theorie der Stadt /
History and Theory of the City
 
HafenCity Universität Hamburg
Überseeallee 16, R. 4.129
20457 Hamburg
 
Tel.: +49 (0)40 42827-4394
Mail: [email protected]