Time & Society

This article examines how the discourse of the new generation of environmental youth movements highlights time and temporality in order to explain the possibilities of change that the movements offer. This is done by analyzing three influential and transnational youth climate movements—Earth Uprising, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays For Future—in relation to three influential diagnoses of the current political condition: postpolitics, populism, and postapocalypse. The article argues that the movements should be understood as mobilizing through negative utopian energies. Using theoretical inspiration from Ernst Bloch, the article states that the discourse should be read as containing acts of hope and utopian impulses that reach forward toward a new beginning of a future possible. The article shows how the movements challenge the diagnoses of populism and postpolitics by their constant critique of capitalism, by reinstalling the people as heterogenous political subjects, and by representing a new temporality. Moreover, the article shows how the mainstream climate discourse contains two temporal narratives that run parallel to each other: one that can be thought of as a vernacular eschatology and one that is seemingly postapocalyptic. However, the article argues that both narratives provide visions of a better future to come, and by using the notion of anticipation, the article states that even the postapocalyptic narrative can be mobilizing. Thus, the environmental youth movements offer a new kind of discourse, one that is non-postpolitical, nonpopulist, and non-postapocalyptic.

Zygmunt Bauman addressed spatiotemporal compression as a critical aspect of the transition from solid to liquid modernity. In this transition, speed and flexibility came to define the conditions of social life which no longer relied on spatiotemporal separation as the basis of all power relations. But digitization of these conditions raises the question of whether the present phase of modernity depicts a resolidification of capital and power that exploits the fluidity of a densely intermediated world. By treating databases as the new localities of power, the digital operations inherent to their utility and productivity render the systemic nature of intermediation as solid as the power relations of the pre-digital era. The example of mass surveillance demonstrates the solidity of a new power derived from surreptitious data gathering and collation in populations attuned to intermediation as a way of life. A new mass culture is emerging through spaces of power that have reset speed in the service of datafication. This is not simply a culture of mobility and choice but one prefabricated and utilized for advancing the redesigned solidity of a digitized modernity.

This article, drawn from an ethnography of a rural farming co-operative in the East of England, argues that the temporal experience of the digital is one of a-temporality rather than acceleration. In using the term a-temporality, the article is elaborating on a concept briefly discussed by Mark Fisher to denote an alienation from time, combining it with Natasha Dow Schull’s writings on casino capitalism. Schull suggests that Las Vegas capitalism has moved from streamlining time to deforming it, rendering it tensile and pliant. A similar temporal distortion is apparent in the community’s experience with digital devices. The article explores the relationships of coping the community members form with their devices, arguing that they utilize them to self-medicate emotional distress and in doing so open new ways of existing in time. In this way, the article makes sense of the fact that the group – environmentalists largely sceptical of other forms of technology – has adopted the digital so readily.

This article investigates how evidence of the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines is enacted in news media via a focus on the temporality of vaccine development. We argue that time constitutes a crucial object of and mechanism for knowledge production in such media and investigate how time comes to matter in vaccine evidence-making communication practices. In science communication on vaccine development, the vaccine object (along with the practices through which it is produced) undergoes a material-discursive shift from an imagined “rushed” product to being many years in the making and uninhibited by unnecessarily lengthy processes. In both these enactments of vaccine development, time itself is constituted as evidence of vaccine efficacy and safety. This article traces how time (performed as both calendar time and as a series of relational events) is materialized as an affective and epistemic object of evidence within public science communication by analyzing the material-discursive techniques through which temporality is enacted within news media focused on the timeline of COVID-19 vaccine development. We contend that time (as evidence) is remade through these techniques as an ontopolitical concern within the COVID-19 vaccine assemblage. We furthermore argue that science communication itself is an important actor in the hinterland of public health practices with performative effects and vital evidence-making capacities.