Search

In this introduction to the Special Section 'Laboratory Times', the editors argue that a focused body of scholarship at the intersection of time and the laboratory has yet to materialize. To contextualize the papers that comprise the Special Section, we survey the role of the lab within time studies, as well as the place of temporality within Science and Technology Studies (STS). We show how time is made to structure and shape scientific practice and how scientists work with and create time to suit the frames and needs of experimentation. While one might expect to find as many forms of scientific time as there are branches of science, the specific temporalities of bench science have been largely overlooked by scholars. We introduce the arguments of the papers in this Special Section - observing their shared interest in the ways that time is materialized, negotiated and produced in laboratory settings. We conclude by imagining a future in which a research trajectory focused on 'Laboratory TImes' brings scholars in time studies and STS further into conversation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in the life course position of adulthood. The normative significance of coupledom and procreation as markers of adulthood has hardly diminished, although the nuclear family model has opened up in past decades in Euro-American countries. I argue that the close connection between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. The paper is based on 31 interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes. Communal dwellers' negotiations of future trajectories dealt with finding someone to build their life with, whether commitment could be expected in friendship and roommate relations, and whether long-term communal living is compatible with existing housing structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate changes in every social sector, every web of life, radical change is occurring, and we all have to find ways to relate to such fundamental transformation. In this paper, we explore how museums can engage with environmental changes and concerns in new ways. By understanding how the power of time operates, one can make visible temporal connections between human and more-than-human agencies, control and negligence and its consequences. The paper explores the huge potential of museum exhibitions to open up various temporal relations, crucial both for witnessing, learning and un-learning the human impact on the world. Time is one of the museum's most important dimensions and the effects of recognizing other temporalities rather than the prevailing anthropocentric ones – become profound. We have selected one particular exhibition to work with: '500 years of Monarchical Power' at the Royal Armory in Stockholm to explore how temporal relations are produced and maintained in this exhibition. The starting point is that time is not only something measured but also made, which opens up for analyzing museum temporalities in new ways. As will be shown under common museum narratives lies temporal complexities that weaves through human-animal relations, care time and those of planetary change. How, then, can we lay the ground for developing what could be called a more affirmative and ecologically inclusive alter-museum by curating time differently ? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Process time' describes the recursive/fluid, social and embodied temporality that characterises much 'women's work'. Though this concept has proven highly useful to feminist analyses of caring and other feminised labour, there has arguably been a tendency for authors in this area to naturalise and valorise this temporality – particularly in relation to the abstract, economic and disciplinary time of the clock. I argue that this naturalisation or valorisation of process time flattens our understanding of feminised labour, and that a feminist social theory of time must recognise the potentially disciplinary forms process time can take. As such, this paper contributes to feminist analyses of time, gender and labour by arguing that the embodied, caring and processual temporality that circulates within modern families can be understood as fundamentally disciplinary. Drawing primarily on Foucauldian theory, as well as Sharon Hays' concept of 'intensive mothering', the paper argues that process time is central to the functioning of the family as a biopolitical institution, just as clock time is integral to the disciplinary mechanisms of the school, prison, barracks, etc. Specifically, it argues that the unique relations of power that circulate within the biopolitical family rely on a unique use of time: one that is intensive and oriented towards the rhythms of the physical body – that is, processual. Further, this disciplinary time is deeply and fundamentally feminine, as it operates (in its ideal form) primarily through the mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussing time and temporality in care work is becoming more central as societies with growing proportions of older persons with care needs strive to arrange cost-effective eldercare. As resources become scarcer, the efficiency of care work is emphasised, and care is increasingly sorted into cost-per-minute units. In our paper, we will analyse the different ways care professionals themselves describe their temporal experiences and practices concerning care interactions in long-term dementia care. Our data consists of semi-structured interviews with care professionals (n = 25) working in round-the-clock service housing in Finland. Using thematic content analysis to analyse the data, we show that, along with a holistic understanding of temporality, good dementia care necessitates understanding alterity, which is insufficiently regarded in linear or quantitative understandings of time. By using concepts of temporal duration (Bergson), crip time (Kafer) and dementia time (Yoshizaki-Gibbons), it is possible to understand another person's alter-temporal experience, into which care can aim to enter and towards which it can attune itself. We argue that a concept of attunement is needed to fully make sense of the ideal temporal practices of dementia care. Our analysis presents attunement as understanding dementia time, receptive practices, and expressive practices, and describes limitations of attunement as temporal discordance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene term invokes the multiple temporalities through which organisms, ecologies, and environments unfold – from the immediacy of the present moment to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Viewed from the perspective of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, these organisms, ecologies, and environments, including the planet's human occupants, may well benefit if we took a view of time that was more-than-human in scope and scale. This paper demonstrates how design, creative practice, and technology can be used to make legible human and more-than-human timescales through local, planetary, and celestial imaginaries that are congruent with the Anthropocene term. It first considers various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic phenomena that are used for time keeping, both human and non-human. It then discusses the design and development of a timepiece that uses observations of environmental light to imaginatively situate daily life within various temporal scales, from embodied, diurnal, circalunar, and annual to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Through the timepiece, the paper argues that a hybrid form of timekeeping that brings together human time standards and environmental observation could help align the temporal imaginaries of urban societies with biological, ecological, and planetary processes, while highlighting the presence of potentially damaging anthropogenic processes, such as artificial light at night. Such hybrid forms of timekeeping may help foster meaningful relationships between people and the environment, facilitate day-to-day awareness of the presence and extent of disruptive anthropogenic processes in our environments and provide an imaginative framework for thinking about urban time and life in an Anthropocene context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how different properties of time and their ethical implications are reflected in the framing of debates around planning and the perceived problem of delay in the delivery of infrastructure. We examine the way in which plans can take the form of 'time maps' that are linear projections of a series of events. This can lead to assumptions that desired futures can only be achieved if the actions that constitute events are performed correctly often coupled with a moral imperative to such performances. It also reflects an orientation towards a more closed view of time that emphasises the significance of ordering such events within a series. This contrasts with a second, more open conception that emphasises the changing, flowing experience of time. Alfred Gell describes these interconnected perspectives as the A- and B-series qualities of time both of which are thick with ethical entanglements. Thus, we use these to set out a framework that applies deontological and consequentialist ethics to the A- and B-series and the tension between delivery and deliberation that exists in infrastructure planning policy to show how different perspectives on time raise different ethical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wage theft claims against Australian universities have raised awareness of the substantial proportion of academics who are precariously employed and underpaid. The COVID-19 global pandemic has further highlighted the extent of precarity for many working in higher education. It is in this context that we situate this paper, reflecting on how time is experienced for academics in a period of growing uncertainty, and what this means for individuals who work on casual or fixed-term contracts. While previous research has examined how academics experience time, limited attention has been paid to the ways in which time is experienced by those in precarious employment. Drawing on interviews with 24 academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts, this paper investigates differences between the experiences of time for those in the 'precariat' and those in ongoing employment. We describe social acceleration and uncertainty as inherent features of the neoliberal context of academia. This paper builds on Ylijioki and Mäntylä's categories of academic time to illustrate how the paid work of precariously employed academics consists primarily of 'scheduled time'. We argue, however, that academics in short-term or casual employment also engage in substantial unpaid work or 'concealed time' in order to compete for future employment. While acknowledging the struggles associated with the acceleration of work for all academics, this paper raises significant concerns about the overwork and risk of burnout for those in precarious employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the understanding of spatiotemporal accessibility inequalities by exploring how the current public transport (PT) provision affects the time wealth of PT users living in two peripheral neighbourhoods in Malmö. The paper investigates time-related resources and constraints that concur in defining accessibility inequalities, identifies forms of temporal disadvantage and privilege and addresses the relevance of recognizing and meeting the multiple time-related needs of (potential) PT users. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the study integrates results from a thematic analysis of interviews and from a GIS spatiotemporal accessibility analysis of PT schedules to understand whether and how the current PT provision (a) allows users to carry out the desired or needed activities by PT in the time available to them, (b) is harmonized with their spatiotemporal access needs and (c) supports or hinders the users' ability to control their travel time. The paper suggests that, in the observed cases, the PT provision provides unequal opportunities for faster connections and information, exposing some users to time-related transport disadvantage. Also, the current PT provision does not always seem to be harmonized with the participants' access needs, especially during off-peak hours. The findings highlight the importance of taking into consideration the time wealth of (potential) PT users with different access needs, resources, and constraints, with the aim to both tackle transport disadvantage and support the adoption of sustainable modal choices. The study provides directions for further spatiotemporal accessibility research and for urban time and mobility policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss our experience in teaching time to university students. Our analysis suggests that students' sociological imagination and fictional creativity might be used as means to deconstruct the hegemonic temporalities of modernity. Specifically, we exemplify our claims by considering a set of classroom activities that use speculative fabulation in order to make students question key assumptions about the objective nature of time. The activities we discuss are based on an original combination of exposure to cultural products, reflective writing exercises, and moderated group discussion, thus opening up new horizons of temporal experimentation, exploration, and interpretation. Our activities invite students to imagine alternative temporalities that are decoupled from prevalent mindsets and challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about the temporal worlds. The assignments are designed as imaginative scenarios, in which students are asked to question the universal, commodified, and absolute notion of time while becoming familiar with the work of relevant thinkers in sociology and anthropology. Based on our results, we conclude that speculative fabulation holds a strong emancipatory potential and is able to bring about significant changes in how students think about time, because it promotes more empowering and meaningful ways of engagement with the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my course "Time" I set out to disrupt the connection between cognitive tools used to represent time (clocks and calendars) and experiences of time. This article documents some of the topics and pedagogical methods I use: using unusual due dates for assignments, making the clock look strange, disrupting the idea of "now," showing how clocks cultivate gullibility, exploring the different hour systems of the past, criticizing clock-based logics used in primatological research, explaining the theory of special relativity, and exploring the political and economic consequences of sleep loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits a graduate course I taught between 2005 and 2014, ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live In, in light of the temporal stresses of graduate student life. Thinking with Donald C. Goellnicht's 1993 article, "From novitiate culture to market economy: the professionalization of graduate students," alongside the more recent work of several graduate students (Blanchard, Wilks and Vogan 2022, Brown 2022; Stoneman 2012; Tootonsab 2022), the article explores the increasing pressure on graduate students to engage in and record activities that are "off-the-clock" of program requirements. In particular, the article considers the contradictory celebration of graduate students' participation in extra-curricular activities that challenge the temporal dynamics of capitalism and colonialism while those dynamics continue to define performance expectations within their graduate programs. Recognizing the complicity of faculty members in exacerbating temporal stress by encouraging the incorporation of extra-curricular activism into the timelines of graduate programs, the article concludes by considering ways to revise ENGLISH 779--The Times We Live in to address more honestly, if not to loosen, the time binds of graduate student life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the importance of time use studies in measuring unpaid care work, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the need for improved methodologies and theoretical approaches to accurately assess and measure care responsibilities. The article also addresses critiques of time use studies, such as the challenges of measuring overlapping activities and the multiple meanings of time in different contexts. The special issue includes papers that explore various aspects of time, temporality, and care, offering new insights and recommendations for future research. [Extracted from the article]

The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants – particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work – are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, 'family times' become inextricably intertwined with the 'times of migration' (Cwerner, 2001). In this context, for many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian source countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, parental migration as a strategy for migrating out of poverty or for socio-economic advancement requires the left-behind family to resiliently absorb the uncertainties of parental leaving and returning. Based on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households (studied from 2008 through 2017) including paired life-story interviews with parental/non-parental adult carers and children, the article investigates the crucial links between the time construct of seriality in migration on the one hand, and the temporal structure of family based social reproduction on the other. It first focuses on how serial migration produces, and is produced by, spiraling needs and expanding aspirations, hence creating its own momentum for continuity. The paper then explores how competing temporal logics create difficult choices for migrants, leading to the recalibration of priorities within constrained resources. By drawing attention to the co-existence of and contradictions between multiple temporalities in the lives of migrants and their families, a critical temporalities framework yields new insights in understanding the social reproduction of families in a migratory context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time plays an integral role in understanding how the social is possible. However, most discussions of sociological classical thinkers—such as Georg Simmel—remain starkly underexplored in terms of their theories' temporal presuppositions. While most responses to Simmel's work credit him for his major contributions to the sociology of space, in this paper I aim to systematically reconstruct his explicit and implicit temporal assumptions and explore how these inform some of his social-theoretical writings and his sharp temporal diagnosis of modernity. For this purpose, I re-evaluate some of his central works using a theory distinction between social-theory, which aims to answer what constitutes the social, versus theory-of-society, where the key focus is what form or forms human societies have taken so far, and especially what form modern society takes. By offering a new reading of Simmel's philosophical and sociological writings, I formulate a comprehensive social theory of time, in which time is both located within individual consciousness and reciprocally mediated by a culturally fixed and supra-individual timeframe, thus highlighting the temporal tensions between individual flexibility and social standardization and coordination. Simmel's diagnosis of modernity reveals a conceptualization of time in spatialized terms, a monetization of time, and an acceleration of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the number of refugees has increased considerably throughout the world, and the difficulties they experience have become more visible in political and social science research. Refugees wait for uncertain amounts of time to cross borders, to obtain legal status and papers, and to establish their lives in a new country, where they try to find suitable housing and jobs, and to benefit from health care and educational services. This article explores how Syrian refugees in Turkey reconceptualise time and place when they narrate these periods of waiting as a way of managing its disadvantageous aspects. It argues that they acquire agency through creating narratives of waiting in their own terms, which also help them to redefine their refugee identities, subjectivities and senses of belonging. It suggests that Syrians in Turkey attribute new gendered and embodied meanings to temporality and spatiality in order to cope with their past traumas and the disempowering effects of waiting. Through their narratives, they aim to gain a sense of control over time in cognitive and emotional terms, maintaining their hope to establish new lives despite structural inadequacies and discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a collection, it makes visible the wide range of pedagogic practices available for cultivating the temporal imagination in higher education, as well as the different disciplinary contexts within which such practices are being deployed. These practices generate creative, disruptive narratives of time as well as, at times, pushback from students with limited experience of such approaches. As with Birth's contribution, Clark's course is also concerned with the proliferation, rather than the unification, of student perspectives, with diversifying and opening up new ways of thinking about and with time. Here again, we see a core introduction to the course being an invitation to students to reflect upon their own experiences of time and on the mechanisms by which they keep time, and by whom and why time is kept. [Extracted from the article]

The sustainability transformation of the food system involves imagining a sustainable future whilst functioning within the current unsustainable food system. Some argue there is a difference between the goal-oriented and comfort seeking form in which the near future is engaged, and the reflexive, imaginary way in which the distant future is engaged. This begs the question, how is engagement with near and distant futures balanced, and what does this mean for the overall sustainability transformation of the food system? We studied future engagement in practices of food entrepreneurship in the Dutch province of Flevoland during the disruption caused by the covid-19-induced lockdowns. This disruption posed a challenge and an opportunity to study near and distant future engagement in depth. Through an online survey and offline semi-structured interviewing, we questioned practitioners of sustainable food entrepreneurship during the first and second lockdown, respectively. The findings show near future engagement is mostly associated with immediate change in practices enforced by the covid-19 lockdown, whereas distant future engagement primarily was visible in continuous change in practices as associated with sustainability. However, this does not mean near and distant future were perfectly balanced. Therefore, we argue pre-existing trends with regards to sustainability can be accelerated or obstructed when they meet the immediate effects of disruption. Our paper concludes by stating the need for more research to the interaction of near and distant futures in different contexts and circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how coupled adults arrange food-related labor in relation to their daily time allocation is of great importance because different arrangements may have implications for diet-related health and gender equity. Studies from the time-use perspective argue that daily activities such as work, caregiving, and non-food-related housework can potentially compete for time with foodwork. However, studies in this regard are mostly centered on individual-level analyses. They fail to consider cohabiting partners' time spent on foodwork and non-food-related activities, a factor that could be helpful in explaining how coupled partners decide to allocate time to food activities. Using 108 daily time-use logs from seventeen opposite-gender couples living in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how male and female partners' time spent on non-food-related activities impact the total amount of time spent on foodwork by coupled adults and the difference in time spent on foodwork between coupled women and men. Results show that both male and female partners took a higher portion of foodwork when their partner worked longer. When men worked for additional time, the couple-level duration of foodwork decreased. Without a significant impact on the gender difference in foodwork duration, women's increased caregiving duration was associated with a reduction of total time spent on foodwork by couples. An increase in caregiving and non-food-related chores by men was associated with an increased difference in duration of foodwork between women and men, which helped secure a constant total amount of foodwork at the couple level. These behavioral variations between men and women demonstrate the gender differences in one's responsiveness to the change of partners' non-food-related tasks. The associations found among non-food-related activities and foodwork are suggestive of a need to account for partners' time allocation when studying the time-use dynamics of foodwork and other daily activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I analyse the processes of vulnerabilisation related to unemployment, based on the case of Spain in the period 2010–2020. I conceptualise unemployment time as empty time that unemployed people attempt to fill using temporal tactics. To explain the degree of temporal agency of the unemployed, I shall analyse their tactics according to four social conditions: previous work socialisation, duration of unemployment, domestic relationship and social class. In terms of method, this study was based on quantitative time data obtained from the most recent Time Use Survey for Spain (from 2009 to 2010), and on qualitative time use data obtained from eight discussion groups and 49 interviews with unemployed people. Drawing on these data, I analyse relationships between temporal tactics in unemployment, the social conditions of the subjects and their processes of vulnerability, and define five temporal tactics, which I term: the investing time tactic, the domestic hyperactivity tactic, the domestic work rejection tactic, the constant effort tactic and the non-tactic. I conclude by demonstrating that these tactics can be sequenced as stages in a process of vulnerability associated with gradual desynchronisation from pre-unemployment times, underlining the importance of socio-temporal categories and conditions in understanding vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E. P. Thompson's classic article "Time and Work-Discipline in Industrial Capitalism," gives an incomplete picture of the transition to the time consciousness in industrial capitalism. This is for two reasons. First, by not understanding time logics of pre-industrial societies and viewing such logics as "irregular," Thompson was unable to understand how wages were paid, and workers disciplined in a culture that used seasonally variable temporal hours in pre-industrial England. Second, with regard to industrialism, Thompson did not recognize the effects on labor of credit and a huge capital influx from the sugar trade on the emergence of manufacturing in England in the 18th century. By documenting the issues of changing ways of relating time to wage, seasonality, place, and finance, this paper argues that the increased year-round availability of capital combined with the alienation of workers from the seasonality of time in specific locations drove the shift from daywork to clock-measured wages during the Industrial Revolution, and that the adoption of clock time was a response to confusion over how day wages could be made uniform over different latitudes and during different times of year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy requires some sort of exchange of knowledge between holders of different knowledge positions. The concept of epistemic justice brings the ability to know and the right to be recognised as a knowledgeable person under a scheme of justice. It problematises social conditions that potentially compromise the ability to share knowledge and thereby effectuate change and the possibility of being recognised as a knowing subject and being granted access to equitable means of producing knowledge. This paper engages with temporal aspects of epistemic justice. What role do temporalities play in people's possibilities to create knowledge and the way they create knowledge? What role does time play in the valuation and circulation of knowledges? How do hegemonic conceptions of time potentially make some knowledges circulate more freely than others? Since conceptions of time connect to specific forms of knowledge, hierarchies and speakabilities of temporalities form an immediate correlate of hierarchies of knowledge. By extension, such hierarchies feed into schemes of epistemic justice. Thus, democracy's duty to emancipate suppressed voices requires emancipating the times from which those suppressed voices speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wisdom is considered to be a prototype of positive functioning and flourishing. In the light of previous studies, wisdom correlates positively only with past-positive and future time perspectives. The main aim of this paper is testing whether adaptive types of internal dialogues weaken the negative relationships between the remaining time perspectives and wisdom or change their relationship to a positive one. To check this, 129 women and 105 men completed three methods: the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, the Internal Dialogical Activity Scale—Revised, and the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale. It was confirmed that different types of internal dialogues can reduce negative and foster positive relationships between time perspectives and wisdom. The results can be used in psychological practice to support clients' development in terms of wisdom. These findings can also encourage independent work on oneself, especially for those who conduct internal dialogues in everyday life but until now have not consciously used these dialogues as a tool for self-development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current article presents a three-stage approach to teaching time in an applied psychology setting. The approach focuses on nurturing temporal reflexivity by having students reflect on their time-use and draw attention to their subjective experiences of time. Activities, discussions, and practical demonstrations are used to guide students through personal, collective, theoretical, and practical lenses of engaging with time. This case sample is taught to postgraduate students and practitioners in coaching psychology and positive psychology. Teaching within this context is discussed, along with the pedagogical practices employed to create a reflective and interactive learning environment. One primary activity, a reflective time journal, is presented as a tool for other educators to consider in their teaching of temporal reflexivity. Further consideration is given to the general challenges of teaching time, including limited temporal resources, and acknowledgements of disciplinary, pedagogical, and personal positionalities. This case sample of teaching time may be of particular interest (1) for those looking to facilitate awareness of subjective experiences of time within the classroom (something we might refer to as temporal reflexivity), and (2) for those who teach in an applied setting where students are often practitioners or future practitioners looking for strategies that will practically inform their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the author's experience since 2018 in developing and teaching a third-year undergraduate course on the history of time at a Singapore university, for students specializing in East and Southeast Asian history and the history of technology. History courses are traditionally taught in a chronological format, with clear periodization, and a nearly exclusive focus on written and audiovisual "texts." The author has found that such an approach is less effective for a course on the history of time, a subject that suggests no obvious periodization or linear narrative, and for which many of his students lack a precise vocabulary. To solve these challenges, the author has borrowed autoethnographic exercises developed by scholars in other disciplines and assigned unconventional tasks such as building water clocks and curating time capsules. While the course has proven popular, it has also invited questions about what a global history of time looks like. Although the industrial and technological history of time is accessible to his students, much of the recent work on temporality presumes a familiarity with European and North American social and political issues that students outside of those regions may lack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, Femma Wereldvrouwen, a Belgian women's organization experimented with a 30-hour workweek on organizational level. All full-time employees reduced their weekly working hours from 36, 34, or 32 (depending on their age) to 30. The experiment lasted one calendar year. By integrating a sociological temporal lens and considering the different levels in the organization, this study investigates how the organization has adapted their work to a shorter workweek based on 20 in-depth interviews and 4 focus-group interviews with employees. We find that Femma Wereldvrouwen combined structural changes on organizational and team level in a formalized way, with room for individual employees to find their own new temporal strategies in a shorter workweek. These strategies relate to focused work and consciousness of time. Although this combined responsibility of making a shorter workweek work was fairly successful, Femma Wereldvrouwen also faced some challenges, such as the lack of "fun" interaction through breaks, and time for "white space" in work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The criminalization of Blackness has led to premature death, high incarceration rates, and psychological stress, all of which impact Black people's temporal horizons. Working in conversation with scholars who empirically documented how Blackness is criminalized and time is racialized, this work explores the degree in which carceral understandings of time provide a framework to better comprehend Black people's temporal experiences. Data for this study include in-depth interviews with six students and 16 graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across six universities in the southern United States and 22 months of observations at a HBCU in southeastern United States. The results indicate that the respondents experience temporal traps that restrict the temporal possibilities of Black people and temporal stasis as they feel trapped within an ongoing history of anti-Black violence. They narrate a desire to "take their time" and "save time" to resist the dominant temporal order. The operative "take" signifies the creating of temporal possibility through uncoupling time's relation to racial structures and "save" signifies freeing time from the structural demands of white supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the diversification and fragmentation of working time arrangements, the organisation of working weeks now differ substantially from each other. To account for week-to-week variability in working time estimates in time diary research, it is important that respondents keep their time diaries on designated registration days. At the same time, this week-to-week variability might lead respondents to postpone their participation to convenient registration days. Research shows that, due to diverse time cycles, postponing participation leads to substantial bias. However, these findings pre-date online time diary methodologies. In online time diary studies, algorithms assign registration days and, therefore, postponement is solely done at the convenience of the respondent and no longer relies on the availability of the interviewer. Analyses of online time diary data from Flemish (Belgian) teachers (ndiary days = 59,969; nteachers = 8567) reveal that postponement depends on (the day in) the time cycle. This postponement is partially selective and thus leads to biased working time estimates. Some oversampling strategies are suggested to account for this possible bias, but a designated, consecutive 7-day time diary approach with postponement remains the recommended standard for collecting reliable working time estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2007, Arctic sea ice plummeted to a shocking record minimum at the time. The amount of ice lost that summer was equal to that lost over the previous 25 years. As Arctic sea ice escapes scientists' predictions, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have critically interrogated "nature"/"culture" divides that treat the time of nature as unchanging and distinct from human beings. This essay examines what concept of time emerges through Arctic sea ice as an analytic lens. By this, I mean scientific knowledge of sea ice and the conceptual possibilities for thinking ice temporalities and environmental time-reckoning that it opens up. Attending to these possibilities suggests different kinds of "clocks" to help reckon the time of environmental changes in the form of (1) climate anomalies (e.g., deviations in ice thickness), which offer a different way of telling environmental time that attends to the physical specificity of substances; and (2) the Arctic Oscillation, a semi-periodic world weather pattern that emerges from the thick of relationships among ice, atmosphere, ocean, and now humans, generating a collective planetary time. Finally, I argue that the relational human–nonhuman production of planetary time shifts the focus in social studies of time from collective time-reckoning, which assumes entities have a socioculturally determined concept of time, toward temporal coordination as a less anthropocentric mode of ordering shared realities. Coordination decenters "the Human" as an epistemic ordering principle and enlarges ordering to include a diversity of nonhuman ways of being. Through temporal coordination, environmental prediction would be the ordering of a collective reality that a multiplicity of human and nonhuman ways of being make together rather than the search for a more precise clock, or development of better technoscientific means to capture nonhuman temporalities external to human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first section on media theory begins with John Durham Peters' essay arguing that the forward-movement of time gives it meaning and explaining how technology functions to capture and distort time. The one that stands out the most is Eva-Maria Nyckel's chapter on Amazon's anticipatory shipping method. [Extracted from the article]

Past negative time perspective (PNTP), characterized by rumination on painful past experiences, is generally considered harmful to a person's well-being. However, there is reason to suspect that a PNTP may not make matters worse if a high PNTP is consistent with culture, as in the case of India. Drawing on the person–culture matching hypothesis, we test the moderating effects of PNTP on the relationship between role stressors and both psychological strain and organizational outcomes among Indian employees in India (n = 253). Two smaller comparison groups of Asian Indians and US-born Americans in the USA were also evaluated to anchor the understanding of the Indians' score on PNTP. This comparison is particularly important given that pressures of globalization on India's culture have created a sustained sense of uncertainty for Indians. Results indicate that the mean score on PNTP is greater for Indians than for US-born Americans (n = 56) and US-Indians (n = 69). Furthermore, having a low PNTP intensified the adverse outcomes due to stressors, whereas a high PNTP had no further impact. Findings suggest that although having an overall PNTP is not ideal, not reflecting on past negative events to cope with current stressors could also be problematic within the Indian context where PNTP is normative. Thus, in a PNTP country, a person's high PNTP has no more adverse effect as stressors increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of studies have sought to understand how mobile phones affect time practices, and beyond them, the experience of time in users' daily lives. This article is a further effort in that direction, employing the deprivation study method. We conducted a field study of 80 adolescents, or "cellular natives," separating them from their cellphones for 1 week. The findings indicate that the cellphone's absence indeed had a dominant impact on a variety of adolescents' time-related practices and experience, that yielded in turn both negative and positive feelings. We propose three main axes for understanding the cellphone's implications for the time experience: The mobile's flexible time v. Rigid time, its ritual time v. Linear time, and its fragmented time v. Continuous time. In all these dimensions, we point to distinct features of the time experience associated with the mobile phone, and also try to relate it to the emotional state and state of mind of today's teens. In conclusion, we propose that a broad understanding of the cellphone's role need to include the aspect of time, at least as it is experienced by adolescents in our current media climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between time and power has been studied extensively. A common strategy through which street-level bureaucrats exert power and dominance over their clients consists of imposing protracted waiting and maintaining uncertainty regarding the outcomes of waiting. In this study, I argue that another facet of power in organizations is related to the temporal typification of cases. By exploring the triage work in two emergency departments (EDs), I show that nurses and clerks identify patterns in the temporal distribution of visits and attach clinical and moral meanings to them. The temporal typifications are sense-making devices through which triage workers orient to patients. They form a stock of tacit experiential knowledge that delineates specific expectations about the legitimacy of cases and the worth of patients. These expectations impact the unfolding and structure of triage admission interviews and contribute to the prioritization of cases. The study brings into conversation the sociological literature on time and power with the study of the moral evaluation of patients to examine temporal typifications as an organizational resource in healthcare settings. It contributes to a better understanding of triage workers' experiential knowledge and the practical accomplishment of moral evaluation in EDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time management applications aim to coordinate and tame the rhythms of social reality. It transpires, however, that in many cases, they somewhat complicate and impede this process, leading to time paradoxes. Using various theoretical tools developed in the critical studies of time and the critique of neoliberalism, I identify three time paradoxes produced by the applications: remembering to remember, planning to plan, and accelerating acceleration. These three paradoxes were brought up and thoroughly discussed in in-depth interviews with self-selected individuals who constantly face challenges related to personal time management. I highlight how managing time using various applications shapes the experience and meaning of time, makes individuals reorganize their social practices, redefines their memory, and influences their emotions. In conclusion, I reflect on how the tension between linear time and multi-temporality is intertwined with the discussed paradoxes and counter-productivity of time management applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the role of time in causal models in the social sciences. The aim is to underline the importance of time-sensitive causal models, in contrast to time-free models. The relation between time and causality is important, though a complex one, as the debates in the philosophy of science show. In particular, an outstanding issue is whether one can derive causal ordering from time ordering. The article examines how time is taken into account in demography and in economics as examples of social sciences in which considerations about time may diverge. We then present structural causal modeling as a modeling strategy that, while not essentially based on temporal information, can incorporate it in a more or less explicit way. In particular, we argue that temporal information is useful to the extent that it is placed in a correct causal structure, thus further corroborating the causal mechanism or generative process explaining the phenomenon under consideration. Despite the fact that the causal ordering of variables is more relevant than the temporal order for explanatory purposes, in establishing causal ordering the researcher should nevertheless take into account the time-patterns of causes and effects, as these are often episodes rather than single events. For this reason in particular, it is time to put time at the core of our causal models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word "shomoy" literally means "time," it goes beyond "clock time" and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal categories, constraints, agencies, and to various degrees, embodies hybrid times (i.e., modern time coexisting with non-linear local/traditional time). Drawing on interviews and participant observations with 22 faculty in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we demonstrate the efficacy of shomoyscapes by illuminating how faculty experience, contest, and manipulate their time(s) amid rapid socio-economic transformations of Dhaka, an urban, Global South mega city. We show how shomoyscapes manifest as faculty experience temporal constraints, such as (a) traffic, (b) party-based university politics, and (c) caring for others. We suggest that Bangladeshi faculty experience and navigate shomoyscapes that are constituted by both larger temporal constraints (spatial, structural, or relational) and their temporal agency in response to these same constraints. Using a temporal lens, we contribute to a more in depth understanding of the experiences of faculty working and living in an urban, Global South context, highlighting how life "outside the academy" spills over into working "inside the academy," rather than vice versa. We argue that shomoyscapes offer a useful temporal heuristic to help contextualize human/social relations in different arenas of social life that would otherwise remain invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the existing literature on the politics of waiting by discussing occupations led by internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Colombia. This literature has emphasised both the power that waiting frequently entails and, increasingly, the agency it can comprise. Yet less has been said about the potential role of waiting in generating resistance. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of power as intimately tied to resistance, this article explores how waiting can, in some instances, produce resistance. It uses fieldwork conducted in Bogotá, Colombia, between October 2017 and August 2018, including ethnographic observations and 120 interviews conducted with IDPs and state officials, to explore the centrality of waiting to IDPs' experiences of displacement in Colombia. Contrary to those who would argue that such waiting encourages passivity, the article draws on a discussion of a two-year-long occupation by IDPs in Bogotá to argue that the long waiting periods facing the occupation's participants prior to partaking in it were instrumental to facilitating the occupation. Waiting enabled the occupation in two major ways: by bringing together a group of people who would not have met had they not been forced to spend prolonged time together in close quarters and by constituting a key source of frustration motivating the occupation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of Finland as a grand duchy within the Russian Empire in 1809 opened up the question of what Finland was, in fact. Comparing Finland synchronously with other countries and diachronically with itself before and after its elevation into a grand duchy gained temporal features in which its level of development was assessed. Such temporal comparisons during the first half of the 19th century were used to shape Finland as a political unit, as they facilitated assessment of which parts of society needed to improve in order to make the country comparable with imagined or real others. Given that the Diet (the Estate Assembly) was not convened between 1809 and 1863, these comparative notions largely dealt with questions of political constitution and state institutions. The comparative mindset of the Finnish actors also developed in the process of conducting temporal comparisons. These comparisons can be analyzed through the analytical categories of descriptive synchronization, comparative synchronization, and participative synchronization, the last mentioned being possible only when Finnish actors began to think that Finland, indeed, had developed to a level of maturity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between 'now' and 'then', historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the differences – or similarities – between the three dimensions. Practices of comparing between and across times pervade all spheres of activity: from high-level theory and historical reflection to the most trivial situations in everyday life. Tracking temporal comparisons is thus a way of exploring the broad middle ground between the consciously elaborated theories about time and the ordinary ways of dealing with time. Our introduction conveys this message in three steps. First, it provides a brief overview of the workings of historical time; second, it introduces the central notion of temporal comparisons while paying special attention to the scales in which they can be studied and their performative character; and third, it gives a quick glimpse into the main contentions of the contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as 'the post-war consensus' – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary's temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comparison of the present to the time of the Prophet could mean very different things at different times and for different people, in spite of the finite authoritative sources, the Quran and the traditions of the Prophet. The article argues that the time of the Prophet and the comparative standard it offered not only changed depending on the concerns of the present from which the authors wrote and the future they imagined, but also affected the present and the future of each community referring to it. In the colonial contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth century, this temporal comparison met with and integrated the model of the stages of development. Comparisons with Europe, standing in for modernity, became central for the location of the community on a scale of progress, but also for attempts to change this position by catching up, educationally, economically, and politically. They went hand in hand with a strong appeal to the emotions: The successful reform of the community or nation was what would make the difference between honor, hope, and pride on the one hand and despair, humiliation, and shame on the other, and it was the responsibility of the present generation to gain or lose the future. The article investigates two comparisons of the present with the early Islamic past, Altaf Husain Hali's Musaddas, a long poem on the Ebb and Flow of Islam (1879), and the speeches Bahadur Yar Jang delivered in Hyderabad in the 1930s and 1940s. Both, though in a noticeably different way, show a Prophetic time, which is not only situated in the past, but also the age of the most perfect form of progress (taraqqi). Reverting to the past thus also means advancing toward the future; comparing the present to the Prophetic times is an indication how far the community is ready to face the challenges of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]