Multiple Temporalities Research Articles

Meshwork Ecology: Climate and Colonialism in Diene's Hell Freezes Over and Ruga's Public Service Announcement

ABSTRACT: Within global academia, activism, and cultural production there has been a turn towards what I conceptualize as meshwork ecology . Here, the relationality and interdependency of all earthbound things are emphasized, as is the multiplicity of human and nonhuman ontologies and epistemologies existing on the planet. This paper demonstrates how reading for meshwork ecological elements can bring to light new features of ecocentric African speculative fiction. After unpacking my understanding of meshwork ecology, I read for certain meshwork ecological elements the novella "Hell Freezes Over" by Mame Bougouma Diene and the short film Public Service Announcement by Athipatra Ruga. I show how reading for meshwork ecological elements illuminates four central aspects of these texts: 1) the interrogation of colonial ways of inhabiting the earth, 2) the centering of interconnectedness and relationality with the nonhuman, 3) thinking with multiple temporalities, and 4) exploring assemblages that involve technology, humanity, and the nonhuman. I expound on how I understand these texts in conversation with meshwork ecological scholarship as examples of planetary resonances, in this case a shared engagement with the looming reality of climate change and the pressing need to rethink how humanity relates to the nonhuman world.

Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised, indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemological-pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning-making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality.

Queer Limitrophic Dwelling

Based on twenty-one months of ethnography and interviews with transborder commuters in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, this article develops the notion of “queer limitrophic dwelling.” Building on queer, feminist, and transnational scholarship on home and dwelling, the article demonstrates how transborder commuters negotiate white Euro-American renditions of home and domesticity that emphasize privacy and fixity as the “proper” ideal vis-à-vis the home. It argues that transborder commuters enact several life-making or queer tactics — practices not necessarily enacted by LGBTQ+ subjects — that spatially decentralize their homes in Tijuana by harnessing transborder kinships and by making queer use of spaces and objects at the San Ysidro port of entry and across San Diego. In doing so, transborder commuters’ domestic labor practices produce ephemeral mobile dwellings when needed, allowing them to navigate multiple temporalities and survive normalized conditions of displacement occasioned by US land ports of entry and racial capitalism. Importantly, queer limitrophic dwelling highlights the US-Mexico borderland's capabilities to nourish and maintain life while also being a product of US settler colonialism engendered through historic and ongoing border violence and exclusion.

The more, the better: queer urban spatialities of Seoul in three films

ABSTRACT Queer space in South Korea’s primate city Seoul has historically remained excluded or invisible across multiple temporalities: in official histories and accounts of the past, in present urban life, and in planning for the future. This is especially noticeable in the municipal government’s numerous revitalization plans which focus on known ‘gayborhoods’ such as Jongno 3-ga. This article identifies and analyzes the structure of differing queer spatialities present in Seoul through close reading and examination of three films: the auteur produced A Cheonggyecheon Dog (2008), the realist documentary Miracle on Jongno Street (2010), and the archival art film Dadaikseon (2018). In these filmic representations, we observe multiple spatialities in Seoul that reflect the precarity and isolation faced by queer individuals in processes of urban redevelopment, the Janus-faced nature of urban space during the night versus the day which can allow or inhibit queer collectivity, and the dynamic erasure of urban spaces which fall outside of hegemonic norms in the face of urban change and gentrification. In the face of the homogenization of Seoul’s urban space, we argue that the identification of a multiplicity of queer spatialities opens up possibility and alternatives to dominant processes and patterns of urbanization, modernization and homogenization – that is, the more non-normative spatialities, the better.

Adapting seasonal beekeeping patterns in western Norway

This paper is about how Western Norway beekeepers synchronise their practices to perceived patterns of seasonal rhythms and adapt their timings and ways of working as they sense shifts in these rhythmic seasonal patterns associated with climatic and environmental (and social) change. It contributes to work on adaptation governance with an emphasis on the time sensitivity of adaptive action in institutions – the importance of taking the right action at the right time – and that this timing is coordinated at the convergence of multiple temporalities across human and more-than-human worlds, within temporal assemblages. The research was conducted in close collaboration with beekeepers over the 2021/2022 seasons and found them to be temporally literate practitioners that are capable of gauging shifts in temporalities, drawing on diverse temporal frameworks (both formal and informal), and recalibrating. Recalibration came both in small incremental micro-manoeuvres to maintain synchrony in a seasonal pattern, or collective efforts to fundamentally adapt or reconfiguring seasonal patterns when patterns fail to ‘hold’. From this perspective, the paper centres and elevates temporal synchronisation in adaption, with attention to the institutionalised capacity of temporally competent practitioners to make use of and recraft the cultural frameworks governing timings.

Singular times and multiple temporalities of the future in tourism planning

Critical thinking about the future needs to be at the centre of tourism planning scholarship. By using complexity theory as a framework to understand the shaping power of time, we review understandings about the future in tourism planning literature concerning three interrelated aspects: How the future is known in tourism planning, how the future has been planned in tourism, and what futures have been planned. Changing, diverse and mutually intertwined views of understanding time and approaching the future are identified and gathered into two interwoven bundles. In the first bundle, the future in tourism planning is singular, foreseeable, and technical, with strong linear and cause-effect assumptions. In the second grouping, as cause-effect assumptions are questioned, futures in tourism planning become multiple, nested, simultaneous and emerge from non-linear, relational, value-laden and time-dependent socio-political processes. A characterisation of singular time and multiple temporalities in tourism planning is presented, and their coexistence in the literature is acknowledged for its potential to stimulate ethical future-making through planning and tourism.

‘I felt as if I was overflowing’: transitions to adulthood in the aftermath of the Colombian armed conflict

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a rethinking of the temporal conditions of childhood by centring the affective experiences of fourteen young activists who continuously inhabit the past by working at a collective memory museum in Colombia. It questions notions of time as linear, progressive, chronological, and universal and instead presents alternative ways of being in time. I discuss young activists’ struggles to imagine mundane futures while constantly comparing themselves with the experiences of the victims of the armed conflict. I then discuss how the museum, as an institutional site of remembrance, sanitises and dictates how the young museum workers ought to remember, making them feel inadequate when their emotions do not align with the museum’s mission. The young activists demonstrate how their transitions into adulthood are determined by simultaneously inhabiting multiple temporalities and defying adult expectations on how to remember.

Public art’s counter-temporalities, the case of the Garden Library, south Tel Aviv

In research on public art, there is a tendency to link art’s transformative potentialities to its temporal dimensions, namely duration, rhythm and the type of social relations they produce. However, beyond acknowledgement of what it might do, temporality received little conceptual attention. Using The Garden Library as a case study, this article foregrounds temporality as a theoretical and methodological framework to examine public art’s performative and structural patterns. The Garden Library is a multi-lingual and cultural space for refugees and migrant workers founded by the art group Arteam in the southern neighbourhood Neve Sha’anan, Tel Aviv in 2009. This article traces the project’s changing temporalities and considers how they create an inclusive time-space that is largely unavailable for the migrant communities living in Israel. It largely draws from art history and human geography scholarship to conceptualise time and temporality in relation to space, practice, and displacement and to further deepen our understating of the unique modes of knowledge and socio-political critique public art enables. The article also brings forth the entanglement of multiple oppressed temporalities, including native Palestinians and non-Jewish refugees, and reads the Garden Library against the background of Israel’s settler-colonial and ethnocratic state. Centring temporality, therefore, has two goals. The first is to examine the usage of time, alongside space, as a control mechanism and to draw links between shared experiences of dislocation and dispossession that are often studied separately. The second is to amplify the occasional collisions and intersections of marginalised temporal landscapes, including that of the Mizrahi (Arab-Jews) working class residents of Neve Sha’anan, and the possibility of such moments to produce counter-temporalities that adjust and resist forms of spatio-temporal power.

The modern and the Monster: heritage activism in the post-socialist city between performance and performativity

ABSTRACT This paper explores the role of urban grassroot movements in the social configuration of contentious heritage and multiple temporalities and political articulations of heritage defense activism. Using the case study method, the paper traces the genealogy of one urban movement in defense of socialist modernist heritage in contemporary Montenegro, shedding light on the process of slow political recognition as opposed to the wide and rampant repertoire of urban contention and socio-cultural appropriation. Focusing on the events following the announcement of the construction of the 12-floor skyscraper (colloquially dubbed “the Monster”) in the immediate proximity of the iconic modernist Hotel Podgorica, the paper theorizes the capacity of urban activism in the contemporary post-socialist city to activate heritage dynamics and leverage urban knowledge as a tool of cultural control. Relying on a multi-method approach including participatory observations, interviews, urban and critical discourse analysis, and the archival research, this paper provides a multi-perspectival analysis of the complex interactions between contentious heritage, grassroot movements and political performativity in the post-socialist city. The results shed light on the evolving role of citizenship in urban development, signaling a paradigm shift towards engaged architecture and emancipatory urban activism as mechanisms for mitigating institutional inefficiencies and political performativity.

Design for disassembly and cultural sites. The use of modular architecture and prefabrication in exhibition venues

The article discusses the use of modular architecture and prefabrication in exhibition venues, looking at the possibility of designing installations with multiple temporalities. Through four concrete experimentations, we discuss ways of repurposing precast modules in new layouts with different functional programs in line with the “design for disassembly” concept. The article also emphasises the relevance of the massive residential construction programme based on modular and prefabricated systems launched by the German Democratic Republic in the mid-1970s, and the importance of reducing the environmental impact of concrete production today. Moreover, aiming at the need to devise new strategies, it presents a research agenda towards the adoption of prefabricated modules or the cultural sector. The four cases presented here are derived from the experimental use of modular solutions by the Porto-based practice SUMMARY: the GOMOS system indicates that prefabricated modules may have a longer lifespan than traditional building layouts, as they can be repurposed, making their reuse economically viable and environmentally friendly; the “Infrastructure-Structure-Architecture” installation at La Biennale 2016 reflects on possible adjustments in the construction industry; the project for the 2018 YAP MAXXI showcases the design process of a temporary installation that becomes a permanent building; and the VR exhibition “The Reasons Offsite” addresses prefabrication as a portable dissemination project.

The ‘full-flowing stomach’: unwholesome food, climate, and colonialism in King Lear and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive

Abstract This article considers Kristian Levring’s 2000 film The King is Alive from a radically open historicist methodology, analysing the film as a product of multiple interleaved archives. An adaptation of King Lear, the film’s relevant archive includes documents from the English Renaissance like the early modern recipe books and seventeenth-century medical treatises that this article uncovers. Yet because The King is Alive was filmed in an abandoned German mining colony in the Namib desert, the archive must also include accounts of the colonialist ‘Scramble for Africa’ more than two centuries after King Lear was written. The methodological deftness of history-as-adaptation allows us to see the film’s anxieties about food that rest at the nexus of these two archives. Shakespeare’s play worries about liminal foods—species-specific foods, foods that fail to nourish, and foods that become poison—but the film updates these concerns to implicate Western imperialism and global capitalism. Surrounded (and, in one instance, killed) by potentially botulistic cans of carrots that remain after the German occupation, the characters in the film must grapple with the toxic leftovers of colonialism, including Shakespeare’s playtext. The film thus asks its audience to consider further archives related to the imperialist roots of the invention of canning, the discovery of vitamins, and the export of Shakespeare as a ‘civilizing’ figure. Finally, the film gestures to the foodway challenges exacerbated by both capitalism and climate change, becoming a palimpsest of archives from across multiple temporalities: a Shakespearean past, a colonialist present, and a warming future.

The future never dies: a relational approach to secular and religious entanglements of posthuman utopia

ABSTRACT The article explores the cybernetic utopian ideals of transhumanism and posthumanism, focusing particularly on the concept of the singularity, which incorporates both scientific and religious dimensions. This investigation subsequently leads to an in-depth examination of temporal concepts within the broader discourse surrounding the disenchantment thesis in secular modernity. Drawing on the framework of multiple temporalities proposed by Lorenz Trein and Helge Jordheim, the article suggests a perspective that enables an understanding of diverse interpretations of history and the future as a dynamic interplay that transcends the binary opposition between (secular) science and religion.

‘On the cusp of something huge’: Anticipatory subjectivities in freelance fashion work

This article draws on an (auto)ethnographic study of a group of freelance fashion professionals, known as ‘fashion agents’, with a particular focus on their relationship to time. It aims to elucidate the temporalities that permeate their work lives and shape their subjectivities, which I coin as anticipatory subjectivities. Such subjectivities, I posit, are emblematic of the conditions of flexibilisation, precarity and hopeful investment in the future characteristic of contemporary cultural industries and, more broadly, late capitalist knowledge economies. I propose that agents’ life-worlds are permeated by a promissory regime – i.e., living in anticipation of constantly deferred, adjourned and unsecured rewards. Such a regime produces subjectivities that are premised on a hopeful emotional investment in the future, coupled with a preparedness for, and a capacity to navigate, incalculable risks. Another feature of the ‘timescapes’ that agents have to negotiate is the simultaneity of multiple fluid, unstructured and often conflicting temporalities and tempos, which requires a particular kind of time-competence. Finally, the article also foregrounds the importance, in agents’ temporal orientations, of kairos: the right, opportune moment. Such a moment is normally perceived as being just about to happen; yet, it cannot be orchestrated or precipitated. As a result, one of agents’ key temporal experiences is that of waiting, which de-subjectivises them and inhibits their capacity to act. Together, these time-orientations – anticipation, managing multiple temporalities and a hopeful waiting for kairos – underpin and foster subjectivities and forms of affective labour that sustain the cultural industries; they are also emblematic of the temporal conditions of late capitalism.

In search of time: Higher education teachers' experience of an online professional development course

AbstractThis article investigates teachers' lived experiences of an online professional development (OPD) course in Denmark – that is, Teknosofikum – through a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective, and it relies on the interpretive analysis of 15 semi‐structured interviews. The article's contribution focuses on the theme of ‘time’ and highlights it as a multifaceted construct that plays a relevant role in learning. By relying on the ideas of temporal structuring and multiple temporalities, the article shows that OPD courses and HE teachers' engagement nest themselves into pre‐existing and complex nexus of commitments and duties, each of which has its own temporality and rhythm, along with longer‐term aspirations for pedagogical development. As time emerged as a relevant aspect characterizing OPD course design and HE teachers' experiences, the article provides simple recommendations for ‘time‐aware’ OPD courses.

The politics of spectrality in earthquake ruins: remaking dark tourism in hauntology

This study asks how specters have made disaster sites enchanting and important places of dark tourism, resonating with the history of the site and reconciling its current existence. The research is situated in Yingxiu town, the epicenter of the 7.8-magnitude 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China. Yingxiu is filled with haunted stories of the preserved ruins, but also carefully presented to tourists as a memorial and museum space. Drawing on the framework of spectral geography and hauntology, the article analyzes how disaster ruins serve as an extended expression of multiple temporalities, a space of affects shared by different agencies. Different yet intersecting interpretations of the three kinds of specters, including the spirits of the martyrs, purified souls, and invisible lives, have co-constructed the uniqueness and powerfulness of this monumental place of great death and rebirth. The persistent negotiation and rewriting of Yingxiu as a spectral site have cultivated alternative, materialized, and evocatively affirmative representations of the part of history significant and poignant at the same time. Thus, dark tourism can function as a rite of passage and provide a liminal space for community rebuilding and the reincorporation of one’s social life. Keywords: Dark tourism, ghost tourism, spectral geographies, hauntology, Wenchuan earthquake, politics of affirmation.

Introduction: towards migration-violence creative pathways

ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on ‘Arts-based approaches, migration and violence: intersectional and creative perspectives’ highlights the complexities and paradoxes in relation to existing debates in the field. Drawing on the emerging body of rich work that has recognised the importance of arts-based approaches within research on migration and violence, the introduction provides a critical assessment of the nature of the connections between the two in methodological, empirical and conceptual ways. It explores these intersections across multiple geographical scales, temporalities and imaginations through innovative creative research. In contributing to these debates, the introduction and the papers included in this special issue examine the potential for new insights, understanding and transformations to emerge through engaging with visual, performative, visceral, embodied and collaborative arts-based research. Yet, it also addresses some epistemological and ethical concerns including tensions around participation, positionality, co-production and the decolonisation of research. The introduction also aims to move beyond evaluating the benefits and drawbacks of arts-based approaches and provides a conceptual frame delineated as ‘migration-violence creative pathways’ that emphasise feminist and embodied perspectives. The frame does not prescribe how to engage with the creative arts, but rather encapsulates the variety of ways to do so. Finally, we set out an agenda for future creative research on migration-violence connections that highlights some practical, epistemological and conceptual suggestions for critically and productively engaging with arts-based approaches.

Taking Time to Know the Island: Multiple temporalities and changing mobilities on Dugi Otok, Croatia

This article is based on the results of field research conducted on several occasions in 2020 and 2021 on the island of Dugi Otok, situated off the Dalmatian coast in Croatia. The article explores the notion of multiple temporalities emerging through the entanglement of spatial transformations, diverse forms of mobility and the lived experience of islanders. The concept of ‘multiple temporalities’ introduced in this article approaches these three aspects as heterogeneous temporal modalities that point to the coexistence and interplay of diverse, sometimes even opposing and contradictory, temporal rhythms. Inspired by theoretical and methodological approaches arising from the temporal turn while rethinking their potential in the context of Island Studies, the article focuses on the specific relations emerging from infrastructural development and the embodied experience of islanders. In order to grasp the complexities of what is popularly referred to as ‘island time’, the aim of the article is to show how processes of transportation development shape islanders' experiences of time.

Transnational Temporalities: Capitalism, Crisis, Social Movements

The article reconsiders contemporary internationalist experiences in relation to the multiple temporalities that characterized key cycles of struggles in the 2010s. Although these cycles are heterogeneous in social and political composition, they have resulted in significant synchronizations. The article's specificity lies in linking a reinterpretation of internationalism to an examination of the role that multitemporalities play both in longue durée capital development and in the various phases that characterized the post-2008 world. The series of crises that have marked the past decade have in fact led to contradictory outcomes, on the one hand opening the door to the rise of post-fascist forces, while on the other hand triggering unusual and powerful struggles. These outcomes have contradictory political orientations but are united by the fact they all have temporalities that are discordant with those initially imposed by capitalist processes. With regard to social movements, the article shows how the diversity of the geographies, practices, and claims animating them can be understood as unfolding “within and against” the post-2008 global scenario. It illustrates how contemporary social movements exhibit complex and contradictory rhythms and temporalities, arguing that the tuning between these multitemporalities is vital for rethinking the renewal of internationalism today.

The trap of 'multiple temporalities': it is possible to write without chronology

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Are there limits to globalising the medieval?

AbstractThe aim of this article is threefold: firstly, it seeks to critique, from the perspective of Iberian and Latin American studies, the Eurocentrism inherent in the research programme known as the ‘Global Middle Ages’ that has emerged in the last two decades in Humanities faculties primarily in the USA and Europe. Secondly, it argues that the identification of global neomedievalism is particularly indicative of the Eurocentric limits of the global medieval paradigm, which is illustrated with several examples from Hispanophone contexts. Lastly, it proposes some alternative theoretical frames through which to analyse the histories of diverse geographies, which seek to account for multiple global temporalities in different linguistic traditions without reinforcing the medieval/modern construction that is in turn rooted in systemic forms of racism and antiblackness.