
Karen Barad
(UC Santa Cruz)
Re-membering Time. For the Time Being.
Abstract to follow
Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. They held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning(Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is a founding member of the Science & Justice Research Center and served as the Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC. Barad is affiliated faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. They received an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University in 2016, and they are on the faculty of the European Graduate School.
(UC Santa Cruz)
Re-membering Time. For the Time Being.
Abstract to follow
Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. They held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning(Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is a founding member of the Science & Justice Research Center and served as the Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC. Barad is affiliated faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. They received an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University in 2016, and they are on the faculty of the European Graduate School.

On Barak
(On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt)
The Time of Coal
In a process of global carbonization, during the nineteenth century Western Europe infected the entire world with coal, spreading it from the British Isles via the Middle East to India and China - which are today some of the worst greenhouse gas emitters. This fossil fuel and the technologies that combusted it - steam engines and the trains, steamers and telegraph lines they animated - also brought about a new global temporality. We usually regard it as 'empty homogeneous clock time'. However, examined on a global scale and especially from the Global South the time associated with modernity appears differential and heterogeneous on the quotidian and historical levels both. Focusing on this modern mechanical temporality in the British Empire's peripheries, my talk examines the connection between new notions of colonial belatedness such as those associated with "Egyptian time" and patterns of carbonization and de-carbonization in the Anthropocene. I will ask whether and how the various kinds of synchronicity inscribed with and made durable by technopolitical assemblages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have become platforms for the emergence of different trajectories and speeds of de-carbonization today.
Professor On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006). Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, I was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer at the history department at Princeton University. In 2009, I received a joint Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University. I also hold an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Joint LL.B. and B.A. in Law and Arabic Language & Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I am a co-founder and co-editor of the Social History Workshop, a weekly blog published on the Haaretz website analyzing current Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of contemporary historical research.
(On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt)
The Time of Coal
In a process of global carbonization, during the nineteenth century Western Europe infected the entire world with coal, spreading it from the British Isles via the Middle East to India and China - which are today some of the worst greenhouse gas emitters. This fossil fuel and the technologies that combusted it - steam engines and the trains, steamers and telegraph lines they animated - also brought about a new global temporality. We usually regard it as 'empty homogeneous clock time'. However, examined on a global scale and especially from the Global South the time associated with modernity appears differential and heterogeneous on the quotidian and historical levels both. Focusing on this modern mechanical temporality in the British Empire's peripheries, my talk examines the connection between new notions of colonial belatedness such as those associated with "Egyptian time" and patterns of carbonization and de-carbonization in the Anthropocene. I will ask whether and how the various kinds of synchronicity inscribed with and made durable by technopolitical assemblages in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have become platforms for the emergence of different trajectories and speeds of de-carbonization today.
Professor On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006). Prior to joining Tel Aviv University, I was a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and a lecturer at the history department at Princeton University. In 2009, I received a joint Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from New York University. I also hold an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Joint LL.B. and B.A. in Law and Arabic Language & Literature from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I am a co-founder and co-editor of the Social History Workshop, a weekly blog published on the Haaretz website analyzing current Middle Eastern affairs through the lens of contemporary historical research.

Karim-Aly S. Kassam
(Cornell)
The Ecology of Time: Anthropogenic Climate Change and The Role of Ecological Calendars
What if: (1) Knowledge is not in our heads but in the relationships with our environment; (2) Time is not a fungible commodity but experienced uniquely; and (3) Time is both flexible and relational? This conceptualization of time may help us anticipate the impact of climate change at the local level. Ecological calendars that arise from conceptualizing time as a unique experience that is relational and flexible emphasize the complex connectivity between our biophysical and the sociocultural habitat. Diverse societies in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia have integrated the human body into the seasonal rhythms of their habitat. They have used these embodied ecological relations to generate “calendars of the human body.” These ecological calendars have historically helped communities anticipate time. However, with industrialization, marking the start of the Anthropocene, both the minds and bodies of indigenous and mountain societies were colonized by invading cultures. We will explore the role of ecological calendars: (1) To respond the debilitating anxiety caused by lack of anticipatory capacity faced by rural and indigenous societies that are at the forefront of anthropogenic climate change; and (2) Decolonize the mind and habitat of human societies from the impact of the Anthropocene. Thus, establishing a pathway for the articulation of a methodology of hope based on transdisciplinary research among indigenous and rural societies.
Karim-Aly S. Kassam is International Professor of Environmental and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Natural Resources and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. Methodology of Hope: Dr. Kassam’s objective is to seamlessly merge teaching with applied research in the service of communities. His research focuses on the complex connectivity of human and environmental relations, addressing indigenous ways of knowing, food sovereignty, sustainable livelihoods, stewardship, and climate change. This research is conducted in partnership with indigenous communities such as the Standing Rock Sioux Nation (USA), the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (USA) as well as in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Kongur Shan Mountains of China, and Alai Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. In 2016, he was awarded 1.2 Million Euros to lead a project to develop anticipatory capacity for climate change. By investigating the relationship between biological and cultural diversity, Dr. Kassam seeks to expand the foundations of the notion of pluralism.
(Cornell)
The Ecology of Time: Anthropogenic Climate Change and The Role of Ecological Calendars
What if: (1) Knowledge is not in our heads but in the relationships with our environment; (2) Time is not a fungible commodity but experienced uniquely; and (3) Time is both flexible and relational? This conceptualization of time may help us anticipate the impact of climate change at the local level. Ecological calendars that arise from conceptualizing time as a unique experience that is relational and flexible emphasize the complex connectivity between our biophysical and the sociocultural habitat. Diverse societies in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia have integrated the human body into the seasonal rhythms of their habitat. They have used these embodied ecological relations to generate “calendars of the human body.” These ecological calendars have historically helped communities anticipate time. However, with industrialization, marking the start of the Anthropocene, both the minds and bodies of indigenous and mountain societies were colonized by invading cultures. We will explore the role of ecological calendars: (1) To respond the debilitating anxiety caused by lack of anticipatory capacity faced by rural and indigenous societies that are at the forefront of anthropogenic climate change; and (2) Decolonize the mind and habitat of human societies from the impact of the Anthropocene. Thus, establishing a pathway for the articulation of a methodology of hope based on transdisciplinary research among indigenous and rural societies.
Karim-Aly S. Kassam is International Professor of Environmental and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Natural Resources and the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University. Methodology of Hope: Dr. Kassam’s objective is to seamlessly merge teaching with applied research in the service of communities. His research focuses on the complex connectivity of human and environmental relations, addressing indigenous ways of knowing, food sovereignty, sustainable livelihoods, stewardship, and climate change. This research is conducted in partnership with indigenous communities such as the Standing Rock Sioux Nation (USA), the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe (USA) as well as in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Kongur Shan Mountains of China, and Alai Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. In 2016, he was awarded 1.2 Million Euros to lead a project to develop anticipatory capacity for climate change. By investigating the relationship between biological and cultural diversity, Dr. Kassam seeks to expand the foundations of the notion of pluralism.

Rahul Rao
(SOAS)
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
Queer theory has enriched our understanding of the relationship between time, psychic life and political transformation. Yet much of the extant queer theoretical literature on temporality has taken the form of a critique of the 'chrononormativity' (Freeman) of the queer liberalism of the North Atlantic. The restricted spatial frame of these engagements has given a great deal of this work a manifesto-like quality that urges us to refuse the linear time of queer liberalism, encouraging us to think and feel our way backwards, forwards, not forwards or sideways in time, if we are to mine our queer potential. In this talk I will suggest that if we were to widen the spatial frame of inquiry to take seriously the disparate trajectories of queer politics in the postcolonial world, it would be difficult to read in any singular fashion what might more appropriately be thought of as the heterotemporality of the global queer political present, much less to advocate singular reorientations of political temporality. I will try to demonstrate how time (and space) matter differently in the queer postcolony. Working through recent struggles against antiqueer laws in the afterlives of British imperialism as they are lived in Uganda, India and Britain, I will examine the ambivalent potentials of memory and futurity for queer postcolonial struggle. Rather than articulating a temporal manifesto, I will offer something more akin to an anthropology of time that is attentive to how queer postcolonial movements navigate time in its multiple political functions ‘as a limit, a resource, a site of exploitation and ultimately antagonism’ (Agathangelou and Killian).
Rahul Rao is the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010), both published by Oxford University Press. He is currently writing a book on the politics of controversial statues. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy collective and blogs occasionally at The Disorder of Things. He has research interests in international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, gender and sexuality, and South Asia.
(SOAS)
Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality
Queer theory has enriched our understanding of the relationship between time, psychic life and political transformation. Yet much of the extant queer theoretical literature on temporality has taken the form of a critique of the 'chrononormativity' (Freeman) of the queer liberalism of the North Atlantic. The restricted spatial frame of these engagements has given a great deal of this work a manifesto-like quality that urges us to refuse the linear time of queer liberalism, encouraging us to think and feel our way backwards, forwards, not forwards or sideways in time, if we are to mine our queer potential. In this talk I will suggest that if we were to widen the spatial frame of inquiry to take seriously the disparate trajectories of queer politics in the postcolonial world, it would be difficult to read in any singular fashion what might more appropriately be thought of as the heterotemporality of the global queer political present, much less to advocate singular reorientations of political temporality. I will try to demonstrate how time (and space) matter differently in the queer postcolony. Working through recent struggles against antiqueer laws in the afterlives of British imperialism as they are lived in Uganda, India and Britain, I will examine the ambivalent potentials of memory and futurity for queer postcolonial struggle. Rather than articulating a temporal manifesto, I will offer something more akin to an anthropology of time that is attentive to how queer postcolonial movements navigate time in its multiple political functions ‘as a limit, a resource, a site of exploitation and ultimately antagonism’ (Agathangelou and Killian).
Rahul Rao is the author of Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020) and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010), both published by Oxford University Press. He is currently writing a book on the politics of controversial statues. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy collective and blogs occasionally at The Disorder of Things. He has research interests in international relations, postcolonial and queer theory, gender and sexuality, and South Asia.

Nisi Shawl
(Writer and Editor)
Telling Time's Lies
Thank you to organizers and participants. My work is writing science fiction, fantasy, horror: speculative fiction (SFFH). Importance to SFFH of time:
Frequently set in “The future”
Familiar involvement of time travel (effects such as Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” loops, many worlds)
Also time dilation (near-relativistic travel, empires, ftl drives)
In experience of authors time compacting (are these characters ever going to finish dinner/leave Sri Lanka/have sex with one another)
Alternate history inflection points (“for want of a nail,” Alternate Kennedys, Everfair)
On personal level I am multiply marginalized: as an African American steeped in a different relationship to time. Sometimes this relationship romanticized as “noble” or “unspoiled,” and conflated with rustic, unsophisticated life. Cyclical nature of time not necessarily an agricultural or rural concept—I’m from urban setting, town in US Midwest, and many adherents to this viewpoint, many influenced by it, past and present, are and were, city dwellers. Not just vegetation that circles and spirals: stars, music, livestock, humanity. What’s repeated can feel stronger. (Repeat 2 X) Repetition loops time’s vector back upon itself: holidays, rituals, major life phases such as birth and death. It creates resonance and ties of identity between individuals and community. Repetition can extend the experience of time beyond the beginnings and endings of individual lives.
We name children after parents and elders, distinguishing them as “junior” or “the third.” We talk of a recent arrivals as having “Aunt Blanche’s butt” or “Grampa Carl’s nose.” Nigerian naming sometimes formalizes this notion: Babatunde, for instance, means “father returns.”
This sense that past is with us, ancestors with us, is not easily lost, even after centuries of estrangement. As child, I used to imagine that invisible people followed me around, listening to my mental explanations of modern times. I didn’t call them egun, but that term fits.
People are stories. Stories tell of time while surviving it, riding its flow, yet carrying time with them: nostalgic descriptions in Chandler’s settings, attitudes toward gender identity in Heinlein’s 1963 Podkayne. John Crowley’s Engine Summer tells of how its protagonist *becomes* a story.
My stories are meant to outlive me, to gain and bear fresh meanings into the future. Recent podcast interview lauding me for “predicting the pandemic” (“Good Boy” party and “Momi Watu” soft surfaces) though I was just observing present. Also compare Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” plague parties in medieval Europe, Colonial US inoculation parties. “Good Boy” genesis from “proving societies” and “Momi Watu” from Butler’s fear homework.
Walidah and adrienne on how we are walking science fiction. We are dreams of our ancestors. How can we affect past? How can dreams of what will be change what has happened? Knowledge of these dreams moved egun to challenge limitations.
Another way we can impact past is by how we bring it forward. Past lives in our memories of it. “What is remembered lives.” Remember it differently and it is made different.
With Everfair I re-envisioned the past to avert the deaths of millions. Often told that my version seems more plausible than what happened. My more optimistic presentation of the past can help us in the past make happier decisions that may lead to a better future.
Latinx author David Bowles recently Tweeted about concept of Nican Huehcatlahtolli, a melding of inaccessible past and future as one distant realm he names Tamoanchan. Traditional knowledge and scientific wisdom blend to bring us to this future which does not delete the past.
I used to have a poster on my wall of a bunch of naked women dancing, pose evocative of hunting. Caption: Remember the Future. That’s my job, remembering the future.
Rasheedah Phillips, an African American author attorney met in 2015, says “Time is a lie.” Not entirely a lie. A fiction. The plot of this fiction varies from culture to community. Tell it with joy. Tell it with love.
Nisi Shawl is an African American writer and editor best known for their fiction dealing with gender, race, and colonialism, including the 2016 Nebula finalist novel Everfair. In 2019 they received the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished service to the genre. Shawl’s collection Filter House is a co-winner of the James Tiptree, Jr./Otherwise Award. Additional publications include the collections Something More and More, A Primer on Nisi Shawl, and Talk Like a Man, part of PM Press's Outspoken Author series. In 2020 they received the Locus Magazine Award, the Starburst Magazine Brave New Words Award, and the Fiyah Magazine Ignyte Award for editing the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. They received a second 2020 Locus Award for co-writing the classic text on inclusivity Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and for teaching related courses. Prior to putting together New Suns, they edited and co-edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity; Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia Butler Scholars; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl lives in Seattle, where they take frequent walks with their cat.
(Writer and Editor)
Telling Time's Lies
Thank you to organizers and participants. My work is writing science fiction, fantasy, horror: speculative fiction (SFFH). Importance to SFFH of time:
Frequently set in “The future”
Familiar involvement of time travel (effects such as Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder,” loops, many worlds)
Also time dilation (near-relativistic travel, empires, ftl drives)
In experience of authors time compacting (are these characters ever going to finish dinner/leave Sri Lanka/have sex with one another)
Alternate history inflection points (“for want of a nail,” Alternate Kennedys, Everfair)
On personal level I am multiply marginalized: as an African American steeped in a different relationship to time. Sometimes this relationship romanticized as “noble” or “unspoiled,” and conflated with rustic, unsophisticated life. Cyclical nature of time not necessarily an agricultural or rural concept—I’m from urban setting, town in US Midwest, and many adherents to this viewpoint, many influenced by it, past and present, are and were, city dwellers. Not just vegetation that circles and spirals: stars, music, livestock, humanity. What’s repeated can feel stronger. (Repeat 2 X) Repetition loops time’s vector back upon itself: holidays, rituals, major life phases such as birth and death. It creates resonance and ties of identity between individuals and community. Repetition can extend the experience of time beyond the beginnings and endings of individual lives.
We name children after parents and elders, distinguishing them as “junior” or “the third.” We talk of a recent arrivals as having “Aunt Blanche’s butt” or “Grampa Carl’s nose.” Nigerian naming sometimes formalizes this notion: Babatunde, for instance, means “father returns.”
This sense that past is with us, ancestors with us, is not easily lost, even after centuries of estrangement. As child, I used to imagine that invisible people followed me around, listening to my mental explanations of modern times. I didn’t call them egun, but that term fits.
People are stories. Stories tell of time while surviving it, riding its flow, yet carrying time with them: nostalgic descriptions in Chandler’s settings, attitudes toward gender identity in Heinlein’s 1963 Podkayne. John Crowley’s Engine Summer tells of how its protagonist *becomes* a story.
My stories are meant to outlive me, to gain and bear fresh meanings into the future. Recent podcast interview lauding me for “predicting the pandemic” (“Good Boy” party and “Momi Watu” soft surfaces) though I was just observing present. Also compare Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” plague parties in medieval Europe, Colonial US inoculation parties. “Good Boy” genesis from “proving societies” and “Momi Watu” from Butler’s fear homework.
Walidah and adrienne on how we are walking science fiction. We are dreams of our ancestors. How can we affect past? How can dreams of what will be change what has happened? Knowledge of these dreams moved egun to challenge limitations.
Another way we can impact past is by how we bring it forward. Past lives in our memories of it. “What is remembered lives.” Remember it differently and it is made different.
With Everfair I re-envisioned the past to avert the deaths of millions. Often told that my version seems more plausible than what happened. My more optimistic presentation of the past can help us in the past make happier decisions that may lead to a better future.
Latinx author David Bowles recently Tweeted about concept of Nican Huehcatlahtolli, a melding of inaccessible past and future as one distant realm he names Tamoanchan. Traditional knowledge and scientific wisdom blend to bring us to this future which does not delete the past.
I used to have a poster on my wall of a bunch of naked women dancing, pose evocative of hunting. Caption: Remember the Future. That’s my job, remembering the future.
Rasheedah Phillips, an African American author attorney met in 2015, says “Time is a lie.” Not entirely a lie. A fiction. The plot of this fiction varies from culture to community. Tell it with joy. Tell it with love.
Nisi Shawl is an African American writer and editor best known for their fiction dealing with gender, race, and colonialism, including the 2016 Nebula finalist novel Everfair. In 2019 they received the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award for distinguished service to the genre. Shawl’s collection Filter House is a co-winner of the James Tiptree, Jr./Otherwise Award. Additional publications include the collections Something More and More, A Primer on Nisi Shawl, and Talk Like a Man, part of PM Press's Outspoken Author series. In 2020 they received the Locus Magazine Award, the Starburst Magazine Brave New Words Award, and the Fiyah Magazine Ignyte Award for editing the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. They received a second 2020 Locus Award for co-writing the classic text on inclusivity Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, and for teaching related courses. Prior to putting together New Suns, they edited and co-edited WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity; Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia Butler Scholars; Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler; Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. Shawl lives in Seattle, where they take frequent walks with their cat.