Michelle Bastian

Drawing on a wide range of social science and humanities literature on the centrality of time and temporality in the social world, over the past few months we have come together to develop a research agenda that makes use of time as a crucial lens through which to understand and study the pandemic as it unfolds. This has led to a new collaboration between scholars at the Universities of Kent, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, Stirling and the Mass Observation Archive to investigate the structure and experience of time in the pandemic.

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims to be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege.

Part of a special issue of Parallax on 'Field Philosophy and other experiments'. In a number of accounts, field philosophy has been described as providing freedom from disciplinary constraints. In this paper, however, I suggest the importance of paying closer attention to the strength of philosophy’s boundary policing and the consequences this might have for those interested in the approach. Discussing field philosophy in terms of disturbance, I highlight some of the difficulties and opportunities it produces. In particular I focus on the labour involved in adopting new methods and working in new sites of enquiry. I suggest that reconstituting the ‘philosopher’ outside of their traditional habitats is no simple task. Still, I argue that field philosophers should lay claim to the boundary policing question ‘how is this philosophy?’ in order to proliferate accounts of what philosophy is and can be, with the hope that the discipline’s future might be turned more strongly towards supporting diversity rather than defending purity. Keywords: field philosophy; feminist philosophy; inclusion; methods; field research.

Across a wide range of cultural forms, including philosophy, cultural theory, literature and art, the figure of the clock has drawn suspicion, censure and outright hostility. In contrast, even while maps have been shown to be complicit with forms of domination, they are also widely recognised as tools that can be critically reworked in the service of more liberatory ends. This paper seeks to counteract the tendency to see clocks in this way, arguing that they have many more interesting possibilities than they are usually given credit for. An analysis of approaches to clocks in continental philosophy critiques the way they have too often been dismissed as unworthy of further analysis, and argues that this dismissal is based upon an inadequate understanding of how clocks operate. Seeking to move towards more critical and curious approaches, the paper draws inspiration from critical cartography in order to call for the development of a ‘critical horology’ which would emphasise both the fundamentally political nature of clocks, and the potential for designing them otherwise. A discussion of temporal design provides a range of examples of how clocks might open up new horizons within the politics of time.

Although conceptually distinct, ‘ time ’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd.

While social geographers have convincingly made the case that space is not an external constant, but rather is produced through inter-relations, anthropologists and sociologists have done much to further an understanding of time, as itself constituted through social interaction and inter-relation. Their work suggests that time is not an apolitical background to social life, but shapes how we perceive and relate to others. For those interested in exploring issues such as identity, community and difference, this suggests that attending to how temporal discourses are utilised in relation to these issues is a key task. This article seeks to contribute to an expansion of the debate about time and sociality by contributing an analysis of a variety of ways in which Gloria Anzaldúa utilises temporal concepts as part of her work of rethinking social identity and community. In particular, I suggest that in contesting homogeneous identity, Anzaldúa also implicitly contests linear temporal frameworks. Further, in creating new frameworks for identity, I suggest the possibility of discerning an alternative approach to time in her work that places difference at the heart of simultaneity. I suggest that the interconnection between concepts of time and community within Anzaldúa’s work indicates, more broadly, that attempts to rework understandings of relationality must be accompanied by reworked accounts of temporality.

Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in social life, this article explores the conventions we use to “tell the time.” I argue that although clock time generally appears to be an all-encompassing tool for social coordination, it is actually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking place. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida’s and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions.

Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in social life, this article explores the conventions we use to “tell the time.” I argue that although clock time generally appears to be an all-encompassing tool for social coordination, it is actually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking place. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida’s and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions.

This paper is a response to Val Plumwoods call for writers to engage in ‘the struggle to think differently’. Specifically, she calls writers to engage in the task of opening up an experience of nature as powerful and as possessing agency. I argue that a critical component of opening up who or what can be understood as possessing agency involves challenging the conception of time as linear, externalised and absolute, particularly in as much as it has guided Western conceptions of process, change and invention. I explore this through anthropologist Carol Greenhouse's claim that social conceptions of time can be read as theories of agency. Thus, in seeking to respond to Plumwood’s call to think differently, the question becomes: what kind of writing would enable a fundamental re-thinking of agency without, however, ignoring the way Western notions of agency have been shaped by linear accounts of time? I look to Jacques Derrida's work as one example. I first locate the possibility of re-writing time and agency in the experiential aspects of his writing, which I argue interrupt both the reader’s sense of agency and linear models of reading. But further, I connect Derrida’s work directly with Plumwood’s by examining how his deconstruction of the Western concept of invention may enable another account of creative change that could reshape what counts as ‘agency’ within the Anthropocene.

This article explores Donna Haraway’s overlooked theories of coalition-building along with the tactics of transversalism. I initially outline Haraway’s contributions and discuss why the cyborg of coalition has been ignored. I then relate this work to transversal politics, a form of coalition-building that acknowledges both the need for more open understandings of the subject and also the threatening circumstances that form these ‘hybrid’ subjects. The intriguing alliance that can be formed between them offers ways of dealing with the fears and self-defensiveness that often stand in the way of creating effective political groups. Having explored the tactics that could productively structure interactions between Haraway’s cyborg actors, I broaden this out to discuss community more generally, in order to further explore the possible applications of these theories of coalition. Finally, through the work of Linnell Secomb and Jean-Luc Nancy, I suggest a vision of a community of cyborgs.