Narrative Temporality Research Articles

Talking about strategy: the role of epic plot structures in international contracting

Emerging international markets are frequently characterized by high levels of economic and political uncertainty. Such inherent uncertainties render established ideas of competitive positioning problematic. An alternative perspective is developed which focuses on the day-to-day enactment of strategy through the medium of narrative. Narrative interviews with senior managers from Turkish international contracting firms provide insights into the contested storylines of strategy making. The plot structures mobilized are seen to comprise strategy making “in flight”. Senior managers are further held continuously to test emergent narratives against different audiences for the purposes of enhancing their persuasiveness. The aim is to instil an overall sense of coherence and direction among those with whom they interact. The temporal narratives mobilize epic plot structures from the past for the purposes of ascribing Turkish contractors with heroic identities in their quest for a desirable future. Yet the shared narratives also serve as a means of identity work through which the narrators strive to position themselves within their networks as acknowledged strategy makers. The espoused plot structures are further seen to coalesce to form a narrative infrastructure with direct implications for the future enactment of strategy. The research focus on the essential temporality of strategy narratives has important implications beyond the specific context of enquiry.

Aesthetic Study of Spatial Design in Denis Villeneuve’s Films

Canadian director Denis Villeneuve has carved a distinctive niche in the realm of science fiction cinema with his unique spatial design aesthetics. This paper examines his directorial works including Dune, Blade Runner 2049, and Arrival, exploring how he intricately reveals complex relationships among human emotions, societal structures, and future technologies through natural landscapes, architectural styles, and narrative temporality. Natural landscapes serve not merely as backgrounds but as profound mediators of emotional dialogue with characters. Architectural styles not only align with world-building but also embody technological practicality and functionality. Narrative temporality, employing non-linear structures, deepens inner struggles of characters and exploration of destiny. Villeneuve’s films dazzle not only visually but also provoke profound contemplation on human existence and cosmic significance.

Border Tensions for Rethinking Communication and Development: A Case of Building History in Ticoya Resguardo

This article proposes rethinking communication, development, and social change from a decolonial perspective through the case study of the Ticoya resguardo. It examines how the oral traditions of Indigenous elders construct a history of the territory, positioning orality as a practice of communicative and cognitive justice that transcends the dominant structures of the nation-state. Border tensions are explored both as a physical reality between Colombia and Peru and as a metaphor for identity conflicts. The theoretical framework incorporates debates on post-development, pluriverse, and southern epistemologies, challenging social inequalities. A qualitative methodology based on the praxeological method was implemented in four stages in collaboration with the resguardo’s communications committee. Producing a radio series narrated by participants was crucial for gathering the elders’ narratives through conversations, social mapping, and storytelling. The findings emphasize the break with linear temporality in narratives, the sense of territory beyond state borders, and the identity tensions of river dwellers. The conclusion underscores the necessity of a decolonial perspective, recognizing the impact of monocultures in obscuring diverse forms of life. The Ticoya resguardo case illustrates how communicative justice can highlight the local and everyday, considering the territory essential in the pluriverse, aligning with Escobar’s and Santos’ proposals on transitions toward a pluriversal world.

Narrative Time and Moral Injury in Daniel Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress

ABSTRACT This paper explores the deliberate use of temporal ambiguities and discrepancies in Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress to convey the disturbed retrospections of a guilt/shame-ridden narrator and the relationship between moral injury and temporal narrative techniques, highlighting the gendered nature of the fictional narrator’s moral injury. Drawing on Pederson’s model of moral injury in literature, which deals with perpetrator trauma, it argues that the narrator’s moral injury and its temporal reflexes in the narrative serve to reinforce the thematic and narratorial (re)iterations of female trauma and subsequent moral injury. Ultimately, this analysis provides compelling evidence of Defoe’s astute understanding of the psychology of shame, guilt, and narration, as well as his preference for psychological realism over traditional sequential narration, as he crafts stories that explore the human and psychological consequences of traumatic experiences.

Fanon, temporality and pedagogy: Combatting racist (non-)relationalities of self and other

This article addresses relations between concepts of ‘self’, ‘other(s)’ and ‘othering’ through a reading of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon’s psychoaffective phenomenological and pedagogical narrative approach, reading his work as phenomenological and educational as well as critiquing phenomenology, psychology, educa invites renewed attention to the geopolitical tion and (of course) psychiatry. While most—especially educational—commentators base their engagement with Fanon’s revolutionary materialist phenomenology of racialised embodiment and consciousness on his first book, Black Skin White Masks and attend to his final book, Wretched of the Earth as expressing his core political and philosophical analyses, this article focuses in particular on Fanon’s second and middle book, A Dying Colonialism, evaluating the political possibilities of the specific narrative temporalities elaborated there. Notwithstanding its rather dismissive reception, it is argued that this, middle, book—written during, and as a document of, the Algerian liberation struggle—expresses and develops Fanon’s psychopolitical and performative philosophy of subjective and objective transformation from alienation to emancipation. This philosophy works pedagogically, in imagining the transformation of relations between others, as well as between self and others, including relations between coloniser and colonized, as also between and within selves.

Marking History and Making History: Temporal Narratives and Strategic Internal Communication

Marking History and Making History: Temporal Narratives and Strategic Internal Communication

Meaning without Agency: The Establishment of Meaningful Time Relations as Prerequisite for the Emergence of Biosemiosis

AbstractThis article reexamines meaning, agency, and interpretation by challenging the view that they require primary or secondary agency. Using Paul Ricœur’s narrative temporality, it explores Terrence Deacon’s autogenic theory, reinterpreting it as a narrative process with non-agentic meaning by distinguishing between distended and displaced temporal relations. Distended relations pertain to agency and biosemiosis, while displaced relations involve the meaning found not in the entity but the processes which gave it a functionally historicized existence. Applying Ricœur’s analysis of temporal aporia and Deacon’s concept of zero, the article suggests that meaning in Deacon’s model mirrors the normative process of narrative interpretation. It emphasizes that primary agency requires meaningful organization for agentic action to have a self for which decisions matter, concluding that meaning, life, and primary agency are grounded in already existing displaced temporal relations resultant from proto-interpretative relations not bounded within an organism.

Sex reconfigured: DIY hormone therapy and vernacular endocrinology in transfeminine communities in China

Faced with a restrictive institutional medical landscape, trans people in China turn to DIY (Do-It-Yourself) hormone therapy. While existing health literature has studied the risks and impacts of informal hormone therapy, little is known about the practical strategies and the embedded meaning-making processes around hormone-taking on the ground. Building on digital and in-person participant observation conducted in two cities in China and semi-structured interviews with eight transfeminine individuals between 2021 and 2022, this article examines the embodied practices and community knowledge of tinkering with hormones. Specifically, I examine the ways that conventional biomedical notions of efficacy and risk are both enrolled and contested to understand bodily becoming in the community space. Closely engaging with biomedical structures, ideas, and knowledge, trans people challenge and reformulate dominant notions of efficacy, risk, and toxicity. A form of DIY hormone literacy is taking shape in the community, informed by the hands-on engagement with medicine, an affinity with pharmaceuticals, and people's temporal narratives of transition. Throughout these processes, DIY practitioners multiply the materials and imaginations of medicine. They reshape the narrowly-defined biomedical model of sex and enable an alternative onto-epistemology of hormonal sex-gender that is amenable to modification and constantly in flux. Drawing from medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist, queer, and trans studies, this article contributes to the conversation on the politics and poetics of sex-gender and embodied knowledge production in the community space.

Time, Clocks, and Illnesses in Paul Harding’s Tinkers

ABSTRACT Paul Harding’s Tinkers was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010. This article examines how the novel employs a unique temporal rhetoric to present a post-Enlightenment worldview. As the chronological narrative sequence is disrupted by the main character’s reminiscences and hallucinations, time becomes disjunctive and fragmentary, which suggests that chaos often prevails in human consciousness. The narrative temporality thus becomes ontologically unstable and unreliable, representing a condition of abnormality and aberration. Moreover, this temporal condition is connected with the novel’s repeated descriptions of clock malfunctions and human illnesses, thereby further emphasizing the idea that disorders are an inevitable human condition. As Harding views the precise mechanisms of clocks as an embodiment of Enlightenment rationalism, the emphasis on these disorders signifies a subtle critique of Enlightenment ideals and a receptive attitude toward the inherent chaotic condition of life.

REHEARSING TIME

AbstractThis article explores the times and datedness of new opera. When referring to an opera (20**) the bracketed number that follows the composition title usually refers to the date of composition or the first performance. When asked how many times an opera was played, its interpreters tend to refer to the number of performances, not the number of instances of rehearsal and individual practice. These times often remain unmentioned by performers, composers, production teams and institutions. But what do we make invisible when we exclude the main act of collective labour in the production of a new staged work? How do new operas structure their times and, in turn, how do these various times restructure new opera? I call for an inclusion of the rehearsal in the temporal narratives that new opera tells through its dates and times, emerging from collaborative processes in compound temporalities. With ethnographic glimpses into different operatic rehearsal studios, I examine the process that takes up most of new opera's time – rehearsal time – rather than audiences’ or performers’ lived experiences during the performance. This article maps the times inside rehearsal time – from daily schedules, call times and deep times of props to computational time and the timing of time itself – for better understanding new opera's ontology.

Exploring the lived experience of receiving mental health crisis care at emergency departments, crisis phone lines and crisis care alternatives.

Mental health crisis care includes emergency departments (EDs), crisis phone lines and crisis alternatives. Currently, there is an overreliance on EDs to provide mental health crisis care, with evidence that responses are often inadequate to meet the needs of people experiencing mental health crises. However, the complexities of how individuals experience crisis care across the varying contexts of EDs, crisis phone lines and crisis alternatives remain underresearched. This study used a hermeneutical phenomenological approach to understand the lived experience of accessing care during a mental health crisis. Thirty-one Australian adults who had accessed crisis services at ED, phone lines and/or crisis alternatives participated in in-depth interviews. The findings are organised across the temporal narratives of participants' experiences from (1) point of contact, (2) positive and negative care experiences and (3) enduring impacts. Several themes were generated during these phases. The findings demonstrate the interrelated nature of care experiences and enduring impacts. With some exceptions, care received within EDs was harmful, resulting in lasting adverse effects. Responses from crisis phone lines were mixed, with participants appreciating the accessibility of after-hour phone support but finding standardised risk assessments unhelpful. Responses from crisis alternatives to ED were promising, aligning with the need for validation and human connection, but were not always accessible or easy to mobilise during a crisis. Notably, across all settings, positive effects were firmly attributed to the quality of the relationship with specific crisis providers. The findings bring into sharp focus the lived experience of people accessing crisis care and contribute to the shortage of literature on subjective experiences. Providers may better meet the needs of those experiencing mental health crises by understanding the enduring impact of these interactions and the role of human connection beyond a focus on risk assessment, thereby providing opportunities for a joint understanding of risk and meaning-making. Furthermore, understanding the subjective experience of crisis care can guide reforms to ED and develop crisis alternatives to better meet the needs of people in crisis. The first author and the third author are in designated lived experience (Consumer) roles. The first author conducted the interviews and was explicit regarding their lived experience when engaging with participants. Service users were involved as advisors to the study and provided input into the design.

The chronopolitics of the ‘Left Behind’: Presentism, populism, and Global Britain

This article examines the “Left Behind” as a temporal construct and its political uses. In the UK, the “Left Behind” is predominantly discussed as a group of people sharing a similar geographical locale, White identity, and deprivation. Political parties and commentators have been integral to constructing this White class as a deserving poor and voting bloc, who have not reaped the benefits of economic development. Instead of assessing the empirical validity of the “Left Behind” as a socio-economic category, this article explores how the politics associated with this construct is orchestrated by varied temporal frames. The first section draws upon François Hartog's notion of presentism and Hakki Taş's theorisation of populist temporal narratives to explore how the “Left Behind” is shaped as an object of moral and economic debt, with their prospects threatened by immigrants. The second section explores how Global Britain narratives shape the “Left Behind” as subjects of majority histories. In doing so, it also demonstrates how these imagined figures are cast as subjects who lag behind the demands of late capitalism. The article concludes by reaffirming how presentism is central to the making of the “Left Behind” as a governmental problematic.

Introduction: Continuities, Shifts, and Narrative Temporalities

Introduction: Continuities, Shifts, and Narrative Temporalities

Aging masculinities in the countryside: a qualitative investigation of rural Chinese older men

Aging brings challenges for masculinity construction affecting older men in the countryside. The investigation of what and how rural older men negotiate their gendered identities in contemporary fast-changing societies contributes to the knowledge of aging masculinities. Taking a life-course perspective, this study explores how a group of rural Chinese older men negotiate masculinities and make sense of their aging lives. Twelve older men in a village located in southwest China participated in this study. We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with the participants and collected their life stories which were audio-recorded, transcribed, and coded following a thematic analysis approach. Analysis of the data suggests that rural Chinese older men created a having/being masculine plot while describing their transitions of family roles from providers to becoming helpers across their life courses. They struggled to maintain a sense of control when facing loss and vulnerability in later life and gendered norms in rural China contributed to their masculinity images. We discussed how the findings of this study, particularly intergenerational relations and narrative temporality in the construction of masculinities in later adulthood, contribute to both the research and practices regarding aging masculinities in rural areas.

The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19

AbstractLong COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients’ experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams’s autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams’s narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives—and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them—might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research.

The Cinematic Symphony of Sound: An Analysis of the Music and Sound Effects in "Tenet"

This article presents a thorough dissection of the sound design within the film "Tenet," investigating the crucial role of sound in narrative cinema, and how judiciously chosen sound elements can amplify the emotional resonance of a film. As technology has raced forward, film scores have embraced an eclectic mix of musical styles, including neosymphonic, minimalist, pop, and jazz influences, increasingly blurring the lines between electronic music and other sonic sources. Director Christopher Nolan is celebrated for his unique artistic framework and his penchant for non-linear narratives, while composer Ludwig Göransson has infused the score with avant-garde electronic music styles and techniques to articulate the film's complex temporal narrative. The analysis underscores the exactitude in sound selection, the consonance between musical themes and the cinematic story, the alignment of character idiosyncrasies with the temporal and spatial context of scenes, and the indistinct boundaries between sound effects and music. Moreover, by melding electronic music technologies with Wagnerian leitmotif methods, the film is endowed with a distinctive auditory style. The article's ultimate goal is to transpose these cutting-edge creative concepts into the realm of music composition for various media formats.

Haddis Alemayehu’s Vision of the Old World: Literary Realism and the Tragedy of History in the Amharic NovelFikir iske Mekabir

AbstractHaddis Alemayehu’s classic novelፍቅር እስከ መቃብር(Fikir iske Mekabir,Love until Death, 1958 Ethiopian Calendar, 1965/6 Gregorian Calendar), is lauded by critics as a pioneering realist and modern novel in the Amharic literary tradition. My aim in this article is to scrutinize this take by examining the novel’s narrative temporalities and modes through a dialectical lens. This leads me to argue that the novel’s realism is marked by contradiction and fluidity. Specifically, the emergence of realism inFikir iske Mekabiris accompanied by its breakdown while the realist narrative mode is accompanied by the traditional narrative modes of epic and hagiography (or,gedl).This hitherto unexamined textual and intertextual quality of Haddis’s novel reveals new insights into its thematic content regarding modernity, tradition, and social reproduction under the old Ethiopian order.

Technological Tools for the Conservation and Dissemination of Valencian Design Archives

Design has shaped the world in which we live; it has improved our lives in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. Even if design is everywhere and is the memory of the world, collections associated with it are not usually well-known as design archives which capture spatial and temporal narratives. Saving these types of archives and making them accessible to the public, using them as cultural hubs, might improve our lives thanks to visual literacy, creativity, and innovation. The Arxiu Valencià del Disseny aims to recover, preserve, protect, and disseminate the archival cultural heritage of the Valencian designers. With a collection of more than 150,000 objects, it recovers history and evolution from the applied arts and product design, but with a markedly future-oriented character through the enhancement of the collections and their dissemination thanks to an intelligent computational system featuring cutting-edge technologies in order to prove our understanding of Valencian and European design. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we introduce the AVD project, an interdisciplinary project that has been recently funded by the Valencian Government in order to preserve and promote the heritage of design archives; second, we introduce a set of interactive tools related to the project, such as the digitisation and cataloguing of the collection, the generation of a Design Memory Archive, advanced searching, and semantically relating the digitised collection of the Arxiu Valencià del Disseny based on data interoperability across its collections and a benchmarking tool for designers.

Performing Processions: Premonitions and palimpsests

Aligning historic modes of public performance and participation with anthropological theory that questions the hegemony of Western linear notions of time, this article considers processional performance as a way of looking forwards and back simultaneously through analysis of two case studies of work. Blast Theory's Spit Spreads Death: The Parade (2019), a performance procession including interactive light and sound, took place on the streets of Philadelphia acting as a memorial and celebration of the 20,000 lives that were lost in the city during the Spanish flu epidemic 101 years ago to the day on the 28 September after the Liberty Loan Parade. Six months later, the most deadly virus in living memory, the COVID-19 pandemic, spread around the world and Blast Theory's performance procession seemed to be not only a memorial of the lives lost in the previous epidemic, but a premonition of what was to come. Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke's installation The Procession (2022) snaked around the marble columns of the Duveen gallery at Tate Britain London. Described by Laura Cumming as a procession of the ‘never-ending theatre of humanity’ (2022), this installation of over 150 figures leading towards a pavilion adorned with images of colonial buildings in Guyana both encapsulates and performs a palimpsest of stories of slavery, migration and the movement of people. Rebecca Schneider suggests that it is in the future that our pasts await us: our responses, revisions, or refusals (2018). Analysing these two examples of artworks of premonition and palimpsest, this article argues that processional performance can disrupt linear temporal narratives and memorialize in a way that expands and complicates narratives of sadness, remembering and grief.

Polypharma Fiction

Abstract This article examines how the rise of polypharmacy changes the novel genre’s response to the pain of anxiety and its narrative interest. Necessarily focusing its scope while also registering the fluidity, complexity, and exigency of contemporary psychopharmacological experience, it focuses specifically on how anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications are activating an ongoing reassessment among contemporary novelists of ingrained assumptions regarding the centrality of mental suffering to aesthetics. The books I discuss as “polypharma fictions”—by Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Anelise Chen—each challenge the idea of psychic pain as a precondition of narrative development—whether the pain of existential anxiety (Heti), capitalist aspiration (Moshfegh), or willful determination (Chen). Moving beyond the extremes of alarmism and advocacy that have largely structured scholarly responses to the rise of psychotropics, I attend to the formal significance of psychotropics for narrative temporality, tension, and plot. In this more recent fiction, the question is not whether psychotropics presage the end of the novel genre but, rather, what kind of novel it is that incorporates psychopharmaceuticals and, yet . . . goes on.