Time & Society

This paper begins with a general discussion of chronopolitics and how I intend to apply the term in connection with Eviatar Zerubavel’s “time maps,” using familiar religious and secular examples to illustrate the concept. Then, drawing on recent philosophical and historical work on race and racism, I argue for political “racial” times, albeit of contested periodizations. The uncontroversially racialized time of white modernity then provides the primary focus. Finally, I conclude with a call for the resetting of the Euro-chronometer, whose oppressive temporality has historically come in both left and right versions.

This paper explores an offer of possible legalization that the Hamburg government gave to a group of 350 illegalized West-African migrants in 2013. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in 2017, when the majority of the migrants who accepted the offer were still awaiting its redeeming, I explore the offer as an instrument of governing and as a lived timespace. Taking this route, this article seeks to contribute to the debates around waiting and the relationship between time, space and government in present border regimes. In particular, I argue for the need to pay attention to how waiting, as a technique of governing migrants, works through linear and periodized temporal frameworks. Drawing on feminist critiques of temporal linearity and periodization, and on Povinelli’s work on techniques of ‘temporal bracketing’, I investigate how violence and redeeming are coordinated spatially and temporally in the offer. I argue that temporal frameworks intertwine with territorial imaginaries in ways that allow waiting to appear as a redemptive state. Moreover, I suggest that by attending to multiple and relational temporalities, the coordinates of suffering and redeeming in the offer might be redrawn.

The present article addresses the changes of temporalities within a prolonged displacement process, which has been taking place in the Palestinian city of Jaffa while under Israeli rule. Various temporal perspectives have been imposed by the Israeli authorities on the emptied historical Palestinian neighborhoods, such as terra sine tempore and “ahistorical” narratives. In Al-’Ajami neighborhood, where the Palestinians who evaded expulsion during the 1948 War—the Nakba—were concentered, “freezing” planning policies were imposed until the 1990s, when “privatization” of the refugees’ houses and neoliberal urban renewal began. Following Rifkin’s (2017) notion of “temporal orientation,” this article explores the various temporal experiences of the Palestinians in Al-’Ajami, including waiting, uncertainty, rushing, and a sense of being left out of time. To grasp the multitude of forces acting upon the community, I conducted interviews with six long-standing Palestinian grassroots activists. Analysis of the narratives reveals the various temporalities and rhythms created by the intersectionality and accumulation of oppression and dispossession, including settler–colonial policies and neoliberalism, and illuminates how Jaffa’s Palestinians have coped with—and resisted—them throughout the period under discussion.

Scholars and political observers have noted how the rate of significant events and crises in the Trump administration appear to be accelerating at an unmanageable and irresistible pace, making it difficult to respond to these actions as they happen. This paper uses the lens of the present as a frame for exploring the temporal assumptions and “timing mechanisms” at work in the contemporary moment within American politics, particularly within US foreign and security policy. The paper identifies and explores three elements of this particular present that combine to enable the implementation of Trump administration policy goals. These three areas include the production of an indefinite present, temporal othering, and the rapid tempo of political activity. Focusing on the temporal dynamics of the political present during the Trump administration reveals some of the ways in which domestic and/or foreign acquiescence is realized despite their rejection of recent US foreign policy doctrine. The paper concludes with a reflection on likely implications this will have on the conduct of American foreign policy, ultimately arguing that it is likely to become increasingly unpredictable and even more violent, dangerously exacerbating already existing inequalities, marginalizations, and erasures of difference.

While Michel Foucault is commonly considered as a thinker with a primary interest in space and spatiality, his use of temporal categories, tropes and metaphors has until recently been only partially reconstructed. Working through different phases of his writings and lectures, this paper argues that Foucault opened a complex and interesting – yet to be acknowledged – analytical perspective on historically dominant, but fundamentally contested forms of social time-regimes, which accounts especially for contingent ruptures, silent continuities and the power-structured contexts of their emergence. Elucidating conceptual tools designed towards the analysis of rationalities and practises of temporal government and approaching social time regimes along the axes of power, knowledge and subjectivity, the aim of this paper is twofold: on the one side, it tries to further contribute to a ‘temporal turn’ in Foucault studies; on the other, it attempts to develop a Foucauldian vocabulary of temporal analysis as an alternative or supplement to established approaches in the field of critical social time studies.

Epilepsy is a neurological condition defined by time; it is characterized by a lifelong tendency for recurrent, unpredictable, and unprovoked seizures, during which people lose control over parts of body-mind function. Diagnosing seizures involves using electroencephalograms to represent and classify brain waves in relation to clock time. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in a North American teaching hospital, this paper shows that as neurologists learn to diagnose seizures, they internalize clock time norms for normal and abnormal brain waves. The paper demonstrates how these temporal norms work to assign a set of aesthetics to brain waves: patterns that conform to clock-time norms are beautiful, whereas hard-to-classify patterns are ugly. These aesthetic judgments follow diagnostically complex patients in future hospital visits, who become known, for instance, as “the patient with the ugly EEG.” The paper critiques this ascription of labels to patients and situates the role of the electroencephalogram's clock time in this predicament. It concludes with a speculative design project that reorients the relationship between temporality and embodiment by using the heartbeat as a situated and co-produced alternative to the standardized and invariant clock. Ultimately, the paper argues that the aesthetics of medical technology are fundamental to clinical care, thereby opening up new directions for research at the intersection of critical time studies and disability studies.

This paper reads Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or ‘schizophrenia’. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind ‘cut’. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with ‘psychotic’ temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.

In the early 20th century, mental speed became a dominant measure of intelligence in the United States. For both cultural and technical reasons, this had not always been the case. For 19th-century Americans, quickness of speech and thought often signified lack of self-discipline. Unlike with other objects of temporal measurement and rationalization such as factory work, little scientific or popular consensus existed over how to clock the invisible phenomenon of thought. The cultural and scientific ascent of mental speed thus poses an unsolved historical problem: how and why did Americans adopt this new ideal of intelligence? This essay offers an answer in the introduction and popularization of a new and controversial practice: the timed test. The first timed tests did not so much formalize an existing conception of mental efficiency as establish a new one, using one of the key tools of measurement available to experimental psychology, the mechanical time-keeper. Initially frustrated in their efforts to correlate their subjects' laboratory-measured reaction time with socially recognized achievements such as academic grades, psychologists in the late 1890s borrowed a still-obscure concept from stenography and telegraphy: words per minute. At first, few scientists or members of the public equated reading, speaking, writing, and listening rate with intelligence. Only after American educators, military recruiters, and vocational guidance experts began to adopt timed testing in the 1910s for administrative convenience did mental speed begin to indicate intelligence and knowledge. What began as a way to test minds efficiently evolved almost inadvertently into a test of their efficiency.

In contemporary societies, chronological age is widely used as a temporal basis for regulating and organising social processes. A strong system of chrononormativity provides orientation on, for example, the appropriate time range to start working, have children, or to retire. This contribution explores the multiple temporal organisations of the life course by focussing on the transition from work to retirement as the beginning of ‘old age’. It asks how people get to become ‘old’ through temporal normalities at two scales: first, the life course scale at which temporal normalities are institutionalised; and second, the everyday life scale at which temporal normalities are routinised; and how these two scales are mutually related. The paper is structured as follows: first, I outline the implications of a practice theory perspective on time and the temporal organisation of social practices across the life course; second, I discuss two concepts in order to grasp this temporal organisation, namely chrononormativity and norma-/temporality; third, I present empirical material on assessments of the ‘right’ timing to retire, the re-structuration of everyday time in the retirement transition, and the re-negotiation of ‘wasting time’ in retirement. Results suggest the assessment of certain practices as time ‘well spent’ or ‘wasted’. And it is exactly in this assessment that links chrononormativity to norma-/temporality in retirement: Based on an increased awareness of one’s location at the latter part of the life course, the question regarding how the (limited and decreasing) time left is spent gains a completely new significance and can, hence, become a strong marker of distinction. However, the ambivalence in participants’ account suggests a potential for ‘queering’ time and age as a set of practices that resist and destabilise temporal rhythms.

In the weeks preceding the white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017, HBO responded to criticism of Game of Thrones’ whiteness by announcing a new series from its producers called Confederate that imagined an alternative history in which the Confederacy became its own nation and slavery still existed. A few weeks later, Representative Maxine Waters’ refusal to listen to white male practices of diversion and condescension under the guise of flattery made national news when she interrupted Treasury Secretary Mnuchin's stalling to “reclaim my time.” In this paper, I examine these events as representative of the prevalent contention in the United States that the post-2016 election era is an era of crisis, but look outside the ruling temporality of crisis as it is framed through white supremacy. Reinterpreting this crisis through the lens of black feminist insurgencies against white supremacy demonstrates how the ruling temporalities of mainstream feminism are implicated in the election of 2016 and the events following. In returning to the year 1977 and aligning two feminist moments from that year, the Combahee River Collective Statement and the National Women’s Conference, I argue for a recalibration of feminist temporalities that will allow us, as Lisa Lowe argues, to recuperate the future in the tense of the past conditional, to see “what could have been” as that which may yet be.

When thinking about time and migration, time appears to be the obvious unchangeable independent variable—linear, uniform, and constant—affecting migrants’ experiences. However, what if we reimagine time as a dependent variable affected by migration? Time, thus, is not linear but layered, malleable, and potentially even liquid. Migrants weave time with space, generating past, present, and future, forming multiple simultaneous “heres,” “theres,” and “in-betweens.” A subset of migrants, temporary labor migrants, provides an interesting opportunity to consider how migration affects time (including the perception of time). States permit temporary labor migrants to immigrate only because they consent to emigrate after a predetermined, contracted period. In this paper, we consider what it means to enter into such “migration time” arrangements that warp, transform, and curtail time for migrants, their children, employers, community members, left-behind families, and the state. Migrants’ children who typically exist outside state-brokered labor migration deals develop alternate timescapes from their migrant parents. Based on the analysis of interview data and complementary follow-up conversations with 43 temporary labor migrants in Israel from 11 different countries, we examine how the migration process creates nonlinear time and how migrants discover, lament, manage, enjoy, and struggle with multiple timescapes. Building on the work of Saulo Cwerner, we replicate his model on time and migration to show general patterns for immigrants and modes particular to temporary labor migrants including time ruptures, freedom time (short-term opportunities), and ambiguous time (fuzzy continuities).

The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never really invested into the maintenance of their houses. The results are postindustrial ruins of a special kind: ruins of pre-gentrification. These ruins are former apartment houses whose ongoing decay materialises not just the general postindustrial decline of Bremerhaven, but results from the continued failure of the realization of gentrification. They are ruins of failed anticipation. As many of the people living in the district, these houses might still await a better future, but, statically speaking, time has run out for them. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap (‘Schrott’-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those that are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses’ material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants’ local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. This article maps their temporal agency in order to scrutinize social sciences approaches to the production of time. Whilst discussing recent contributions to the anthropological literature on time and infrastructure, I present these houses with their specific material properties as active partners in the co-production of time in this particular district, and its potential futures.

A common myth about families living in homeless shelters is that they are laconically and contentedly waiting around for housing, financial support through welfare or jobs, and other resources and services. Nothing could be further from the truth. Single parents in shelters dealing with inequities incurred by poverty are busy trying to procure housing, jobs, and other resources while managing children’s behavior and homework, and while attempting to maintain the family’s sense of relational and emotional integrity. Thirty-six African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latinx families living in a New York City shelter were interviewed about the time challenges they face and their means of coping with those challenges. Six themes emerged: (1) franticness, time pressure, and sense of having not enough time; (2) the temporal unpredictability of daily life; (3) the unpredictability of time to live in shelter; (4) anxious waiting for next steps toward employment and housing; (5) the shelter’s control of time; and (6) the importance of family time and strategies used to sustain it. These findings are discussed using theoretical perspectives about the elements of temporal behavior, as well as research on time and personal agency, and recommendations are made for professionals working to support homeless families, especially around their temporal challenges.

This paper contributes to work on the social life of time. It focuses on how time is doubled; produced by, and productive of, the relations and processes it operates through. In particular, it explores the methodological implications of this conception of time for how social scientists may study the doubledness of time. It draws on an allied move within the social sciences to see methods as themselves doubled, as both emerging from and constitutive of the social worlds that they seek to understand. We detail our own very different methodological experiments with studying the social life of time in London, engaging interactive documentary to elucidate nonlinear imaginaries of space-time in London’s pop-up culture (Ella Harris) and encountering time on a series of walks along a particular stretch of road in south east London (Beckie Coleman). While clearly different projects in terms of their content, ambition and scope, in bringing these projects together, we show the ability of our methods to grasp and perform from multiple angles and scales what Sharma (2014) calls ‘temporal architectures’. Temporal architectures, composed of elements including the built environment, commodities, services, technologies and labour, are infrastructures that enable social rhythms and temporal logics and that can entail a politicized valuing of the time of certain groups over others. We aim to contribute to an expanded and enriched conceptualisation of methods for exploring time, considering what our studies might offer to work on the doubled social life of time and methods, and highlighting in particular their implications for an engagement with a politics of time and temporality.