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While previous literature has examined time discourses in social work and demonstrated that social work is predicated on linear understandings of time, one area that has received little theoretical and empirical attention in the literature on time and social work is what effects various social work temporalities exert on the lifeworld of social workers and how they shape their working days. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with British social workers and employs an abductive approach to data analysis. By analysing the participants' experiences of time and work, the article identifies two temporalities that exist in social work practice, paperwork time and compassionate time. Paperwork time is linear, instantaneous and accelerated, requiring social workers to juggle multiple competing demands and needs. Compassionate time is more developmental and cyclical and requires slower engagement. The paper then discusses how social workers negotiated these contradictory temporalities and highlights the potentially negative effects of temporal conflicts on people's health, well-being and on social work practice at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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, 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]

Drawing on semi-structured in-depth biographical interviews with 60 early career Chinese academic returnees, this paper examines the temporal challenges involved in the personal and professional lives of mobile scholars. The key premise is that academic migration process may create temporal resources and opportunities for scholars to pursue career progressions and upward social status, but can also generate temporal constraints in their everyday life, bringing disruptions and discontinuities into their life course timelines. This paper highlights the temporal consequences of academic migration in relation to two perspectives: everyday times and individual lifetimes. Particularly, it also investigates how some returnees exercise agency and employ temporal strategies to alleviate the temporal dissonance produced in and through their moving process. This paper aims to demonstrate whether and how individual scholars confront temporal struggles on a daily basis and reconfigure life course trajectories while negotiating uneven academic mobility regimes. In doing so, the paper develops a temporally sensitive theoretical approach and unpack the multiple kinds of temporalities of academic labour in a cross-border setting, thus further advancing two streams of literature—academic migration and time in migration. Furthermore, it has drawn attention to the growing trend of temporariness and precariousness occurring in modern academia, especially in the context of migration. By examining the temporal tensions academic migrants encounter, this paper answers the call to reconsider the overly romantic engagements with academic mobilities and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the mobility experiences of the highly skilled. [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]

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]

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]

The telegraph literally and figuratively electrified news by transforming reporting into a process that delivered impulses of information whose timeliness often riveted and sometimes excited newspaper audiences. The now-familiar daily news cycle—scheduled reports of recent news punctuated by even more timely breaking news—originated with telegraphic journalism. Daily papers began presenting themselves as the public's portal to an electrified national and international newsgathering network. Looking beyond the role of telegraph firms and wire services, this study explores how the culture of journalistic timeliness was cultivated in organizational, occupational, and public settings. Organizationally, telegraph-enabled timeliness altered every stage of the news-production process, from reporter-source interactions to the delivery of stories to readers. The press reified timeliness internally through organizational rewards and occupational discourses, and externally by projecting its institutional values through marketing and the metatexts that accompanied stories. For the audience, daily papers conveyed the temporal rhythms of a networked industrial society. Audiences valued some timely news as data inputs that enhanced opportunities to participate in distant affairs or influence outcomes, though for economic intelligence private channels almost always outstripped newspapers' public delivery of the same information. But even electrified news valued mostly for its storytelling made events common to many people simultaneously in a manner that encouraged the construction of meaning by scattered audiences. In those situations, timeliness often meant that news circulated fast enough for reactions around the nation to become part of the story itself. [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 paper is an ethnographic exploration of the volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where the extraction of geothermal energy for the production of aluminum is triggering anthropogenic earthquakes. As the aluminum industry seeks to decarbonize their industrial infrastructure, they are increasingly looking to renewable energy havens, such as Iceland, to supply their expansive energy needs. While this paper is partly about understanding the forms of politics at stake in decarbonizing modernity's infrastructures, it is more specifically concerned with the temporal politics of anthropogenic earthquakes in the Hengill volcanic zone in the south west of the country. The paper takes up the perspective of geologists tasked with analyzing the emergence of these new earthquake forms, as well as locals from a small town in the vicinity who are learning to live with them. While focusing on the conflict that has ensued in the wake of earthquake production, the article pays particular attention to the importance of acceleration––both economic and geologic––in their making. This leads to an analysis of how alternate temporal renderings of anthropogenic earthquakes invoke competing claims about the future. Anticipating the future, the paper argues, is a form of temporal politics through which the various actors either legitimize, or protest against, these volcanic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between time and architecture is well established and thoroughly explored in architectural discourse. Despite this, examination of social time has been lacking. This paper draws on a survey of 114 architects, academics and students who responded to general questions about practice and occupational wellbeing. A finding of this study was the diverse attachments that different groups in the architectural community have to the temporal norms and infrastructures of work and of studio. Based on this study, the paper demonstrates the heterogeneity that exists in architecture and how its temporal norms are negotiated. It concludes that exposing the heterogeneity of temporal experience across a discipline reminds us that the norms of time are negotiated. Moreover, the temporal experience of the everyday transcends the notion that architects passively ascribe to long-hours work culture. [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]

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]

The purpose of this paper is to outline the ''ecology of social time'' as an empirical concept of time to bridge the gap between theory and empirical research in the sociology of time. First, this paper proposes that social time could be considered as an institutionalized referential mechanism that enables social interactions to occur at a specific time point by coordinating the social actions of various agents. Examining the condition of temporal coordination and diagnosing its fairness critically may be the tasks involved in the sociology of time. Second, this paper suggests that the ecology of social time is a useful concept for integrating the theses and tasks applied in the sociology of time. Finally, this paper presents an ecological model of social time as a possible framework for subsequent empirical research in the sociology of time. [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]

Studies on ecological modernization have produced a fruitful discussion concerning the connection between society and nature based on the evolution of socio-political institutions. However, the question from the individual's perspective and their evaluation of the environmental institutions' modernization remains unsystematically explored. This paper introduces the actor's narratives on what I called time and space restructuration to define a sensitive method to explore the socio-ecological controversies produced by the enactment of a new environmental institution at the national level. The paper reconstructs the social discourse in relation to the exponential growth of Chilean extractive industries, which run in parallel with the government's intent to ensure high levels of sustainability through institutional changes that occurred between 1990 and 2015. The main argument proposes that rendering the ecological modernization as a final stage of institutional improvement obscures a controversial reorganization of actions and roles at the environmental level. From this perspective, the clash between different organizations of time and space at the environmental level, among different social actors, offers a valid perspective on the re-emergence of socio-ecological conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a model for a dynamic and constructivist perspective on generations. To study synchronous, contemporary interrelations between technology, media and generations, many different methodologies are available. Yet many historical, diachronic studies are marred by flaws and ambiguities in their use of 'generation' as a concept. To counter those problems, this paper argues for a process-oriented approach of generations – one which is modelled after Bolter and Grusin's remediation. By distinguishing three mechanisms – immediate generation, immediate regeneration and hypermediate regeneration – the model of regeneration is linked to three theoretical concerns: the long-standing dilemmas in the sociological study of generations, the controversy around technological determinism in technology studies and contemporary challenges in research of ageing and youth cultures. The feasibility of the regeneration approach is elucidated by applying it to toys, especially educational toys. This paper also provides a methodology for the historical study of generations interacting with media and technology by recommending the combined use of three types of biographies as source materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waiting is a part of everyday life. It is often characterised by its banality: its quotidian nature. Time spent waiting can be seen as boring, wasted, and at times painful or distressing, or conversely hopeful or full of potential. The experience of Motor Neurone Disease (MND) reveals a population for whom (limited) time has a significant impact on quality of life. This paper will argue that waiting, for people with MND, exemplifies the relationship between time, power and agency. In so doing we can better conceptualise the manifold ways in which time and waiting are experienced through choosing to wait, enforced waiting and waiting when time is known to be 'running out'. Through a sociological analysis of multiple forms of waiting three key themes emerged that characterised waiting as powerlessness; emotional (as a form of production), and; alternating as an experience between patience and endurance. This paper challenges the passivity, universality and ambivalence ascribed to waiting and instead argues that waiting affects the 'time left' for people with MND. It also offers up a lens through which to view time through the multiple textures and tensions of waiting produced through chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Waiting is a universal experience and a 'taken for granted' form of time. However, it is given a social specificity when embodied by particular agents in particular settings. This paper reflects on the universal experience of waiting in the very particular setting of the prison, specifically a prison visitors' centre; this is the space where families wait prior to visiting their incarcerated relatives. I draw on the literature of waiting and prisoners' families, as well as my own empirical work and ethnographic observations of waiting families. In this work, I explore issues of power and agency, and explore the social relations which are orchestrated within and beyond this organisation of space and time. This paper aims to bring together two distinct areas of literature: one which explores how prisoners 'do time', and the other which explores the impact of imprisonment on the families outside. In marrying the two, this paper explores the temporal impact of the imprisonment on the family members of those incarcerated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon ethnographic data gathered in Shanghai, this paper explores residents’ experiences of, and responses to, living within an environment, which displays features of what Rosa terms ‘social acceleration’. After exploring anxieties induced in residents who feel sedentary – relative to others – and their attempts to cope with this, this paper focuses upon how residents’ attitudes towards social acceleration become refracted in imaginative forms, especially texts currently circulating within Shanghai, which insinuate ostensibly supernatural characters into certain prominent locations in the city. As these texts critique ‘progress’ and register residents’ anxieties regarding social acceleration so they smooth over disquiet and unease thereby encouraging not only discourses of development but also the patterns, pace and tempo of social acceleration. The final part of this paper explores the costs of ‘slowdown’, arguing these are sufficient to compel residents not only to re-engage with, and therefore perpetuate, socially accelerating forms but perhaps even to intensify them, hence the deployment of the term ‘re-acceleration’ in the title of this paper. [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]

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]

Increasing time pressures, an accelerating pace of work and the need to juggle an increasing number of competing demands are common experiences of academics working in contemporary universities. At the same time, notions of ‘time famine’ and ‘time squeeze’ have formed relatively long-standing topics of social science research and popular debate. This article draws together interviews with 15 academics based in sociology departments at four UK universities, with existing research on time, work and leisure to explore the social dynamics that underpinned these academics’ experiences. The paper argues that it is not only quantities of overall work, but the qualities of time made through everyday work, which are important for academics’ experiences of time. In particular, the paper identifies three key mechanisms that pull towards the fragmentation of daily and weekly schedules: work–leisure boundary making, organisational structuring of time and the intrinsic rhythms of practices. These mechanisms combined in different configurations depending on institution type and career stage, advantaging some and disadvantaging others. The paper provides an alternative to existing accounts about the effects of new managerialism and audit culture on academic practice, which focus on how increasing amounts of work ‘squeeze time’, and suggests that we should equally be concerned with how qualities of time are made in practice, and the effects of contemporary contexts on these processes. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores methodologically and theoretically how to understand variations in the temporal performances of showering as a practice-as-entity. Time-based data on domestic hot water consumption in 134 Danish households show distinctly different patterns, where some households exhibit highest consumption in the morning and others in the evening. This temporal pattern of showering is analysed based on an innovative combination of statistical cluster analysis and qualitative interviews. Focus is on the timing of showering related to sequences of other everyday practices, and to the rules, meanings and dispositions guiding this practice. From a sustainability perspective, the consumption of water and energy entailed by showering is problematic, and with increasingly intermittent renewable energy production, the timing of showering also becomes an issue. The study demonstrates that the time of showering is closely related to sequences of different practices, that dispositions and socio-demographics influence the order of sequences, and that meanings of showering may vary accordingly. However, there are also common meanings and rules related to showering across these variations, which contribute to the formation of showering as a practice-as-entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is an autoethnographic text in its own right, examines class, gender and education through highlighting the processes at work and the resources drawn upon in the making of autoethnographic texts. At its centre is a poem about my father, which acts as an illustration of how such artefacts exert agency across time, through the play of what Keighley and Pickering refer to as 'the mnemonic imagination', enabling a re-interpretation of the past in the present and on into the future. Using the work of feminist scholars Steedman and Walkerdine, the paper offers an insight into the way cultural analyses and 'affective histories' make sense of the fortunes of a 'Scholarship Girl'. At the same time, in exhuming an instance of the good that men do in the form of a crucial intervention in my life by my father, it pays homage to what the poet Robert Hayden called the performance of 'love's austere and lonely offices' plus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to understand the underlying social mechanisms of timed eating schedules. Starting from 24 group interviews carried out in Santiago, Chile, this paper postulates that eating meals to a fixed schedule largely depends on the importance that an individual assigns to social norms on eating times, since this norm can be modified when the individual is alone or upon the emergence of compelling bodily, family and productive demands. The results shown in this paper contribute to an understanding of how the time aspect of eating food is subjectively experienced and present an invitation to rethink food de-structure thesis. [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]

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]

Abstract The paper analyzes young cannabis users' experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees' under- involvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time management, a strategy that again brings the users further away from the social time structures of society. We identify temporal synchronicity, or rather the lack of this, as a central challenge for the interviewees' social identities and general feelings of a meaningful everyday life. Further, we argue that the young cannabis users are both social and temporal "outsiders" to society and that new time management strategies are key to reversing this process of social marginalization. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with 30 young cannabis users in outpatient drug treatment in Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies two temporal metaphors, modern and poetic, encountered in a knowledge-based organization where they co-exist and conflict. It argues that the two metaphors are wedded to different discourses, i.e. to the macro-business and the micro-scientific discourse, respectively; hence, knowledge activities such as thinking and writing are increasingly rendered incomprehensible in commercialized research environments, and pushed at the margin of knowledge-work, since they prove difficult to measure and control. Practically, this implies a re-articulation of what innovation is and how to organize knowledge work. The paper explores the shortcomings linear metaphors of time bear when used to support radical innovation, and concludes by discussing the potentials of spiral time to structure work in knowledge organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belonging is a fundamentally temporal experience, yet there exists to date little research on belonging as a temporal phenomenon. This paper offers an important contribution to the literatures on belonging, time and the self by exploring how the experience of belonging is tethered to time. Focussing on the temporal dimensions of the interconnection between belonging and the self contributes to our understanding of how people experience time and construct a sense of self. The data comprise 62 accounts on belonging written by members of the Mass Observation Project’s panel of volunteer writers residing in Great Britain. Two dimensions of duration are explored: first, enduring belonging compared to fleeting belonging and second, belonging that endures ‘out of time’. In relation to the first dimension, I argue that the duration of belonging aids in constructing a coherent self over time and thus speaks to a person’s moral character. The second dimension of duration illustrates experiences of belonging that defy understandings of linear temporality and a singular self, thus demonstrating the fundamentally distributed nature of the self. Attending to the duration of belonging also adds to our empirical understanding of how time is experienced by people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological work has often characterized the contemporary future horizon as a space crowded with risks and contingencies. This view has prompted a number of claims that young adults conceptualize the future predominantly in terms of the choices and plans that they make to mitigate against such concerns. As an extension of this logic, a number of studies have suggested that young adults conceptualize the long-term future extending beyond their own lives separately from their more immediate horizon of planning (Leahy et al., 2010; Toffler, 1974). This paper discusses how young adults relate to the long-term and more immediate future concurrently, and in doing so considers the points at which the strategies that they use to cope with contingency in their own lives may intersect with the ways that they approach their fears, hopes and imaginings of the long-term future. The data for this paper are drawn from an interview project in which young adults (aged 18–34) were asked to discuss their own futures, and a general idea of the future. The findings are used to form the beginnings of a typology of the approaches that young adults may adopt when engaging with the future, which is then drawn upon to propose that the ways in which they engage with the long-term future are often related to the strategies that they employ when facing their own futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article argues that despite growing rates of single living worldwide, alternative representations of the single women who do not necessarily spend their life 'waiting for the one' are regularly absent from public view. By exploring the injunction as well as the option of non-waiting, this paper contributes to time studies by stressing how understandings of waiting inform hegemonic and alternative forms of temporal subjectivity and sociality. In the first part of this paper, I explore the ways in which the injunction to stop waiting is articulated in heteronormative imagery. This call is regularly expressed with temporal urgency, and from this vantage point waiting comes to represent passivity and immobility. Accordingly, women are expected to 'move on' and be active in their own self-governance, which adapts to conventional norms of femininity. In the second part of this article, I demonstrate how the option of non-waiting dismantles and reworks heteronormative life scripts, and offers new subject positions for single women. These reflections propose alternative timetables that allow single women to reclaim their temporal agency and re-define their own temporal rhythms and life trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research and policy studies on the low-carbon future highlight the importance of flexible electricity demand. This might be problematic particularly for residential electricity demand, which is related to simultaneous consumers' practices in the household. This paper analyses issues of simultaneity in residential electricity demand in Spain. It makes use of the 2011 Spanish Time Use Survey data with comparisons from the previous Spanish Time Use Survey and the Harmonised European Time Use Surveys. Findings show that media activities are associated with the highest levels of continuity and simultaneity, particularly in the early and late parts of the evening during weekdays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the ways in which waiting for migration requires, nurtures and ultimately produces specific kinds of subjects in a part of the world marked by decades of transnational movement towards Europe. Drawing on my ethnographic research in emigrant areas of Morocco, I trace how waiting is a constitutive element not only of migration, but also of the subjects involved in its encompassing and multidirectional processes. To do this, I trace the ways in which waiting is spoken of, embodied and reckoned with in the areas by not (yet) migrants. Focusing in particular on the experience of women married to absent migrant husbands, the paper shows how waiting in Morocco engenders specific types of people with specific kinds of social relations, interceding into the very ways in which selves in proximity of transnational mobility emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]