Mobility, Time & Political Possibility
Deconstructed diasporic workshop
 
Convened by:
Noora Lori
Boston University
Anne McNevin
New School for Social Research
Loren B Landau
University of Oxford & Witwatersrand

Mobility, Time and Political Possibilities is a year-long virtual writing workshop running from early 2021 and culminating in an in-person even in early 2022. We envisage a small, but committed group of scholars meeting monthly, in camera, to share and critically engage each other’s work-in-progress, on a rotating basis. Our aim is to produce a provocative interdisciplinary edited volume or special issue, via a collaborative and iterative process.
 
The regulation of human mobility via the use of time has attracted much recent scholarly attention. Much of this work is concerned with waiting, stoppage, deferral and delay as disciplinary techniques or by-product. Rarely is time and its manipulation framed as a form of elusion or liberation. Less often still, is the time at stake in these techniques, itself submitted to critical inquiry. Does waiting, for example, imply an interruption, and sometimes a form of injustice, only because of assumptions about the progressive direction in which time is expected to flow? Distinguishing specific measures of time from the notion of temporalities – that is, ways of knowing and ordering time - opens up a larger set of questions about space-time parameters according to which mobilities are governed, and futures are imagined and desired. How might processual, quantum, Indigenous or other ways of conceptualizing time be brought to bear on thinking about mobility and its horizons?
 
Our intention is not to produce an almanac of the miserable: a series of studies into forms of waiting or frustrated futures manifested across the globe. Rather, it is to consider how temporal forms of exclusion, alienation, marginalisation and manipulation underlie governance –broadly conceived – and open possibilities for transforming political futures.
 
On one hand, we are interested in the imbrication of time and temporality with mechanisms for racialisation, spatialization, expropriation, displacement and extraction. This includes attending to how states deploy time (and its miscounting) to police national boundaries by developing legal manoeuvres that separate the chronological advancement of the clock from the counting of time under the mantle of the law. By pegging rights to specific legal statuses, and counting the time of different statuses differently, states can suspend, slow down, or speed up chronological time in order to exclude, delay, or (conversely) hasten the inclusion of particular non-citizen residents The politically strategic use of time is not only about control of mobility per se, but also about naming, categorizing, and emplacing in temporal terms (as advanced or backwards, primitive, or modern for example). On the other hand, we want to consider how time and temporality intersect with resistance, critique and the cultivation of alternative political formations, including modes of hospitality and welcome, political community, and justice.
 
How do plural temporalities provide new reference points from which to examine the forms of power at stake in questions of mobility and from which to signal other kinds of mobile aspirations beyond integration into progressive/developmental futures. If time is a discipline, what forms of ill-discipline do multi-temporalities create? How might they operate as forms of intentional or de facto resistance, deploying, what Lefebvre calls polyrhythmicity that makes governing more difficult? Or that generates what Deleuze and Guattari label ‘nomadic power’? How do varied spatio-temporal conceptions of the political present open or curtail the possibility of collective mobilization? What subjects emerge at these points of intersection and disjuncture? What kinds of maps might be drawn to capture the intersection of space, time and mobility imagined and experienced in other ways? What visual and aesthetic vocabularies might be deployed for the same purpose? What histories might inform this openness to temporalities in play? What methodologies are needed to investigate them? Where, when and how do we focus our inquiries?
 
The goal is a collection that is both conceptually and methodologically provocative: outlining new themes, approaches, and considerations for the socio-spatial and political study of human mobility.
 
Those interested in participating are requested to submit a 500-750 word abstract by 19 October 2020. A committee will assess the abstracts and provide potential participants additional details in early November 2020. As an interdisciplinary workshop, we welcome participants from across the social sciences working from all methodological and theoretical perspectives. We particularly encourage submissions from emerging scholars and people working in and on sites outside Europe and North America.
 
All abstracts and queries should be sent to temporality@migration.org.za

Call for Papers
International Society for the Study of Time (ISST)
Eighteenth Triennial Conference
June 26-July 1, 2022 / Yamaguchi, Japan

Time and Measure

Proposals (300 words) due by August 15, 2021

The ISST, renowned for its interdisciplinary scope, invites scientists, scholars, artists and
practitioners to explore questions concerning Time and Measure at its 18th Triennial Conference
to be held in collaboration with the Research Institute of Time Studies (RITS) at Yamaguchi
University in South-Western Japan. Our format of plenary presentations delivered over four days
creates a sustained discussion among participants. We thus expect participants to register for the
entirety of the conference. We shall take a day off mid-conference and provide participants a
choice of time-related excursions in the Yamaguchi area, the site of crucial events at various
turning points in Japanese history .

Because of worldwide uncertainty brought about by the pandemic, we shall be considering
whether and how we may allow for online conference participation. Further information will
follow.

For its 2022 Triennial, the ISST wishes to instigate discussion of all the kinds of temporal
measure—both quantitative and qualitative—which are the work of our different professional
disciplines and some of which may also prove to be cross-disciplinary. When asked about time
and its measure, most people would think of clocks: an even progression of numbers. This view
goes back to Aristotle’s definition of time (in Physics IV) as “the count [arithmos] of changing in
respect of before and after.” As recent events have made us aware, however, times of crisis may
require other measures. Political crises or a crisis like the pandemic seem to impose their own
measure of time. Crisis thus throws into relief the fact that not all times are equal—something
that musicians, strategists and physicians have always known; these professionals and others
have had to develop their own systems of taking time’s measure–some dependent on clocks,
some not.

Suggested Topics

• In what (different/new) ways do physicists, biologists, chemists, geologists, archeologists, engineers and other scientists take the measure of things in time?
• How truth-bearing and/or enduring are various measurements?
• What about ‘probabilistic’ measurements of quantum states?
• Can time and space be measured in the same sense?
• When do quantitative differences become qualitative?
• Are lightyears comparable to nanoseconds?
• Is time (exclusively) defined by its measure?
• How do social scientists generate a metric of temporality? Are statistical measures more or less basic than positive ones?
• How does temporal measure relate to ethical decisions? Are there reliable measures for ethical choices in the instant moment and/or over a human lifetime?
• In what ways do we measure the function of ‘tempi’ in music, poetry, theatre performance, dance and film? How are measures of time involved in the visual arts?
• How does temporal mensuration enter or shape narrative discourses in literature?
• We measure chronologies pretty well. But by what means do we measure the kind of time that is a kairos?
• How do crises (e.g., political crisis, catastrophic climate change, the pandemic) impact the
• measurement of time?

Other Suggested Topics:
--time, measure, money and generosity
--history as the measure or mismeasure of time
--the measurement of public vs individual time
--tense/aspect, mood, person and voice in languages
--measurement as determining our understanding of the measured
--the limits of measuring time
--cosmic clocks

Guidelines/Timeline for Proposals
Proposals will be for 20-minute presentations in diverse formats: scholarly paper, debate, performance, overview of creative work, installation, workshop. Proposals for interdisciplinary panels are especially welcome. (Each paper for a panel must be approved by the selection committee.) All work will be presented in English and should strike a balance between expertise in an area of specialization and accessibility to a general intellectual audience. Proposals, no more than 300 words in length, are submitted electronically. The author’s or authors’ name(s) should not appear in the proposal as the ISST does blind reviewing in selecting papers for its conferences. The deadline for submission is August 15,
2021, with acceptances communicated by December 15, 2021. The Society also seeks session
chairs, whose names will be included on the printed conference program.

http://www.studyoftime.org/News.aspx?ID=35

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for our next Temporal Belongings conference - The Material Life of Time, which will be taking place on the 15th-17th March 2021.  You can find full details of the call, including information on how to submit here.

As part of sharing our thinking and development work as we plan our next conference, Michelle Bastian has written up our thoughts about timetabling a synchronous online conference, and how we came up with the proposed schedule shown below.

Indeterminate Futures / The Future of Indeterminacy
 
Transdisciplinary Conference
13 – 15 November 2020, University of Dundee
 
Keynotes: Karen Barad, Franco Berardi, Xin Wei Sha, Vladimir Tasić
 
The future is no longer seen as open. It’s seen as precarious on the one hand, and technologically over-determined on the other. Economic uncertainty, the rise of the risk society, the culture of fear and neoliberal necropolitics are seen as a serious threat. The risk society attributes all hazards to human decisions; the culture of fear cultivates the tendency to catastrophise; neoliberal necropolitics welds technology to the exploitation of natural and social reserves in an irreversible way. Amidst the general climate of ‘instrumentarianism’ (Zuboff 2019), paradoxes like ‘the cancelled future’ (Berardi 2014) or ‘automated deregulation’ (Steyerl 2019) are synonymous with permanent crisis, disorder, and the 'end of free will' (Han 2017).
 
Indeterminacy – often associated with but not identical to unknowability and liminality – doesn’t merely defy the ‘order-disorder’, ‘certainty-uncertainty’ binary creating a ‘both-and’ and ‘neither-nor’ space in which a cat can be both dead and alive, as in Schrödinger’s experiment. Indeterminacy is a self-perpetuating dynamic of change with no spatial or temporal constancy – a vibrant multiplicity of parallel potentialities and realities. Initially derived from Bohr’s quantum indeterminacy, Gödel's undecidability, and Stengers and Prirogine's non-linear dynamics, indeterminacy upsets stable structures and ossified power regimes which is why it was embraced as a liberating epistemic force by many 20th century artists and theorists: Jarry, Boulez, Cage, Ichinayagi, Situationists International, Xenakis, Fluxus, Knowbotic Research, Derrida, Guattari, Hayles, Varela and Latour, to mention but a few.
In the digital age, in accelerated, informational capitalism, the situation is very different. First, permanent change is the rule. Second, art, culture, and (bio)politics are no longer separate; they are fused in the infosphere. Consisting of datification, algorithmic predetermination, cultural production, symbolic and affective regimes, the infosphere has modified the language of thought and action. It has also modified the structure of reality. The aim of this transdisciplinary conference is to evaluate the current and future epistemic and ontological potential of spatio-temporal, cultural-mnemonic and socio-political forms of indeterminacy. To this end, we ask questions such as:

• How do contemporary digital thinking-making practices articulate the relationship between design and chance, system and impulse, repeatability and irreversibility, rule, iteration and variability?
• How does temporal indeterminacy, as defined by quantum physics, relate to indigenous conceptions of space-time and matter? (Barad 2018)
• How do ‘an-archives’ – heaps of disparate, perpetually multiplied images (Hansen 2011) – pattern cultural memory?
• What are the repercussions of medial efficacy – the fact that algorithms are not mathematical ideas imposed on concrete data, as is often thought, but diagrams that emerge from repetition and the processual organisation of space-time, objects and actions?  
• What is the relationship between indeterminacy and neuroplasticity, our embodied and extended brains/minds’ adaptability to new perceptual milieus? (Malabou 2006)
• How do deterministic technical milieus and the growing mass of unstructured data configure #datapolitik – a set of operations that regulate space-time through the cybernetic feedback loop, tracking, capture, and feelings of safety or threat? (Panagia 2017)

 
We invite proposals for 20 min papers, provocations, creative contributions, re-enactments of scientific experiments and proposals for curated panels from the fields of art, media (theory), physics, mathematics, philosophy, cultural studies, memory studies, digital humanities, and anthropology. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Indeterminate (historical or contemporary) artistic methodologies, e.g. convolutions, destinerrance, obfuscation, culture jamming, databending
• Aleatory composition in music, event scores, performance and psychogeography
• Indeterminacy, observation and measurement
• Entangled (virtual or material) patternings and the collapse of micro-macro, general-specific perspectives
• Superposition and multiple spatio-temporal histories
• The role of repetition, velocity and scale in machine learning and algorithmic ‘promiscuity’
• Computers as inherently re-iterative, indeterminate machines
• Logical aberrations in AI classificatory systems, e.g. those used in affective computing
• Errors/slippages in deterministic technologies (e.g. biometrics or facial recognition software) and their relationship to judgment and digital inscription
• Retroversion and the ambiguity of meaning in digital and legal discourse
• Big data and the indeterminacy of inference
• Glitch and the draining of cultural memory or erasure as tracing
• Indeterminacy and the technological unconscious
• Digital grammatisation of existence (Stiegler) and critical, micro-context-responsive computing
• Posthumanist performativity (Barad)
• The indeterminacy of waste in ecology, topology and anthropology
• Indeterminacy and social identity (e.g. gender)
• The dynamics of liminality as a space-time of transformation
• The history of indeterminacy in physics, mathematics and philosophy
• Indeterminacy as ethics and aesthetics

 
Panel proposal deadline: 20 April 2020 (1000 w proposal + 450 speaker bios)
Individual presentation deadline: 1 May 2020 (350 w abstract + 150 bio) NEW DUE DATE 15th JUNE.
Notification of Acceptance: 10 May 2020
Please email abstracts with ‘Indeterminacy Conference’ in the subject to indeterminacy@dundee.ac.uk
This conference is hosted by the AHRC-funded project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Biopolitics.

We are pleased to annouce that papers arising from our 2018 Temporal Belongings conference The Social Life of Time are now out in Time & Society. See a wonderful selection of papers including Charles W. Mills keynote "The chronopolitics of racial time".

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The social life of time
Michelle Bastian , Lisa Baraitser , Michael J Flexer , Andrew R Hom and Laura Salisbury

The chronopolitics of racial time
Charles W Mills

Waiting as a redemptive state: The ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ and the offer from the Hamburg
government
Kari Anne K Drangsland

Jaffa’s times: Temporalities of dispossession and the advent of natives’ reclaimed time
Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem

The Trump administration’s politics of time: The temporal dynamics that enable Trump’s interests to
determine American foreign policy
Christopher McIntosh

Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault
Jürgen Portschy

Seizure aesthetics: Temporal regimes and medical technology in epilepsy diagnosis
Megh Marathe

The ‘telegraphic schizophrenic manner’: Psychosis and a (non)sense of time
Michael J Flexer

The secret of quick thinking: The invention of mental speed in America, 1890–1925
Justin Tyler Clark

No time to waste – How the social practices of temporal organisation change in the transition from
work to retirement
Anna Wanka

From Combahee resistance to the Confederate : Black feminist temporalities and white supremacy
Tanya Ann Kennedy

Thinking about the meaning of time among temporary labor migrants in Israel
Robin A Harper and Hani Zubida

Ruins of pre-gentrification: Schrotthäuser and urban standstill in a postindustrial city
Felix Ringel

Time as a source of struggle and resilience in homeless families
Peter Fraenkel

The social life of time and methods: Studying London’s temporal architectures
Ella Harris and Rebecca Coleman

In March we held a three day pilot workshop to start testing out some approaches for our next conference. You can see the agenda here and I've also written up some longer reflections over on my personal blog.

In the context of the global pandemic, we invite contributions of time-related writings and projects emerging out of your current experience now. Locked in a heightened sense of the present moment, how has our attention to and expectation of time changed? With increased uncertainty towards the future, how are temporal perspectives shifting and what new concepts are taking shape? 
 
The Anthropocene – the critical era marking human impacts on the environment – designates a duration with fuzzy boundaries. As a geologic era, it remains unofficial and without an origin or ‘Golden Spike’; as a historical period, its span, causes, and definitive questions remain open to conjecture. As a juncture characterized by the entanglement of disparate timescales (biological, ecological, geologic, cosmic), the Anthropocene is less a distinct “time” than a plurality of temporalities.
 
With urgency, we invite scholars and artists to reflect on Anthropocenic temporalities in a variety of modalities, welcoming projects and writing in any creative style or critical genre. We seek to assemble a rich range of contributions from emerging and established writers, who share concern and commitment to the Anthropocenic situation. Contributions are invited for a special issue of Kronoscope: Journal for the Study of Time (Brill) entitled “Anthropocenic Temporalities.” As an interdisciplinary journal directed by The International Society for the Study of Time, Kronoscope welcomes work from all fields.
 
Proposals (abstracts of 250-500 words) or completed work may be sent to the co-editors: Paul Harris (paul.harris@lmu.edu) and Emily DiCarlo (emily.dicarlo@mail.utoronto.ca).
 
Submissions due: June 1, 2020 (11:59 p.m. PST)
 
Paul Harris, Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University and co-editor of SubStance, was President of the International Society for the Study of Time 2004-2013. An interdisciplinary scholar and artist, his current work revolves around stone in contexts including installations, garden design, viewing stone display, geopoetry, and ecosophy.
 
Emily DiCarlo is an artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work applies methodologies that often produce collaborative, site-specific projects. Evidenced through video, performance and installation, her research connects the infrastructure of time with the intimacy of duration. She is currently pursuing her Master of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto and is the 2019-2020 recipient of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Scholarship.
 

Climate Change Temporalities: Narratives, Representations and Practices
A conference on humanistic approaches to climate change
University of Bergen, Norway, 3-5 August 2020 [NB Date change for this conference from 5-7 to 3-5 August]

When we think about climate change, what first springs to mind is probably carbon emissions, extreme weather, draughts, floods, and melting icebergs. But climate change is just as much about time and timescales, pace and acceleration: Climate scientists incorporate lessons from the geological past in modeling possible future climates, politicians are coping with questions of how to make future societies resilient, and environmentalists are calling for immediate action.

Climate change challenges established human understandings of time. Macro-scales such as geological time and historical time become entangled, but just as important is the way changes in climate affect everyday life reasoning, based in personal experiences and immediacy. Climate change also interferes with family life, turning hopes and dreams for the future of “our children” into fear and worries.

This conference will approach how the wide range of more or less entangled temporalities of a changing climate are narrated, represented or expressed through performances and practices. We welcome papers discussing temporalities of climate change both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. The papers may examine quite different societal fields, such as everyday life, art, education, heritage, politics and science, for instance on topics such as:

• Activism
• The aesthetics of climate change
• Anthropocene and time
• Biodiversity and climate change
• Cli-fi
• Climate change in popular culture
• Climate skepticism and notions of time
• Historical time and deep time
• The history of the notions of global warming and climate change
• Media and climate
• Museums and climate change
• Indigenous notions of climate change
• Political narratives on climate change
• Queer culture and climate change
• The temporality of weather and climate
• Theory of history and temporality
• Vernacular notions of climate and weather
• The uses of history in climate politics

The conference is part of the project “The Future is Now: Temporality and Exemplarity in Climate Change Discourses” and is funded by the Research Council of Norway.

Send an abstract (maximum 300 words) for a 20 minutes presentation to: futurenow@uib.no before March 1, 2020. The abstract must include: your name, affiliation and email address. For more information see https://future.w.uib.no/conference/

Terrains of Time: Modern Temporality(ies) in Social Sciences and Beyond
 An International Workshop, Bar Ilan University, Israel June 14-15, 2020  

Time has been studied, researched, and thought over for thousands of years and across cultures. In recent decades, some accounts of the role of time and temporality in human (and non-human) experiences proved fruitful for contemporary thought and research. Those who dared to ask St. Augustine's renowned question—"what, then, is time?"— developed vital and fascinating insights about human and non-human nature(s), cultures, societies, environments, emotions, personalities, and politics. A nuance- sensitive understanding of the social, cultural, and political dimensions of time is of immense potential.
Nevertheless, time as a category is an understudied topic in the traditional humanities and social sciences. Even though Time Studies is now institutionalized in academia (societies, journals, etc.), the field has hardly crystalized into an organized body of knowledge with its own defined and structured vocabulary, working assumptions, controversies, and research agendas, to be reflected in other disciplines. Today, the scholar of space, body and other similar categories can draw from these fields' respective bodies of knowledge. But this is not always the case with Time Studies. Is it a mere problem of institutionalization, or rather does it have to do with Augustin's wonder, i.e. with the elusiveness of the concept of time?
The international workshop "Terrains of Time" is aimed at developing an integrative and interdisciplinary conversation about time as a social and cultural phenomenon, while accounting for global and local contexts. 
Topics:
¨    Time and temporality: definitions, analytical frameworks, narratives, and symbolizations.
¨    Time and related categories: space, body, and subjectivity.
¨    Time and humanity; time in (or after) the Anthropocene.
¨    Time and the social: The role of time in assembling and disassembling individuals and groups, personalities and collectives, actors and networks; measurement, standardization, multi-temporalities, synchronization, and desynchronization.
¨    Time and power: social and political struggles waged about time as a resource, for example regarding status, gender, and labor; time in public policy, social stratification (e.g. age stratification), evaluation and criticism; Time regimes; Global, local, and networked temporalities.
¨    Time and the market: commodification, trading, and soliciting time; Time poverty and affluence.
¨    Micro-interactions: waiting, rushing, getting prepared, aging, time wasting, "quality time," transitions, cheating on time.
¨    Rituals of time, times of rituals.
¨    Time and morality: temporal distributive justice.
¨    Time in ecological challenges and technological developments.
¨    Risk, readiness, and uncertainty (e.g. in future studies).
¨    Time and cultural relativity: Are there groups that experience "more" or "less" time, or groups that have "more" or "less" temporality? Do certain groups care about time more than others?
¨    Time and "the moderns": was the modern period embedded in "temporalization of the experienced life", as maintained by Koselleck and echoed in Latour's conceptualization of the modern?  Did a "temporal turn" take place in history, and/or in theory? On the other hand, are industrialized societies poorer in time (while being affluent in other resources), as common wisdom so often holds?
 
The workshop will explore the social, cultural, political, economic, human, and environmental dimensions of time and temporality(ies) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including, but not limited to: philosophy, literature, psychology, geography, history, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies.

The workshop will take place at Bar Ilan University on June 14-15, 2020. No registration fee is required, but we cannot assist with travel expenses.

Confirmed guest speakers:
¨    Barbara Adam, Emerita Professor, Cardiff University and Affiliate Scholar, IASS Potsdam
¨    Judy Wajcman, Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics
¨    Frédéric Worms, Professor of Philosophy, École normale supérieure
Abstracts of up to 300 words for a 20-minute paper, with a short bio, may be sent to: terrainsoftime2019@gmail.com no later than January 15, 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2020.

The international workshop is organized by the Research Group "It's about Time", sponsored by Bar Ilan's Rector, Prof. Miriam Faust; and under the auspices of the Bar Ilan Center for Cultural Sociology. Organizing committee (alphabetical order): Anat Leibler, Miri Rozmarin, Hizky Shoham, Dror Yinon (Interdisciplinary Studies Unit, Bar Ilan University).