Temporal Boundaries Research Articles

From loss to involuntary liquidity: refugees’ relationships to possessions

ABSTRACT This paper explores refugees’ relationships to consumption and possessions while they resettle in a Nordic country. The results of the empirical study (one-on-one photovoice interviews and micro focus group interviews with 32 Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian refugees living in Finland) elucidate that the loss of possessions caused by forced displacement thrust refugees to prolonged liminality and alter their relationships to material possessions, pushing them from solid consumption to seek stability through temporary liquid consumption. The study contributes to consumer research by highlighting the role of liquid consumption during imposed long-term liminality and precarity and by exploring the temporal boundaries and characteristics of involuntary liquid consumption. The results improve our understanding of how people relate to consumption and possessions when navigating extreme and arduous life transitions and offers implications for NGOs working with refugee integration.

Managing collapsed boundaries in global work

Abstract Global workers have long contended with the challenges of working across geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries enabled by communication technologies. However, the global work research has rarely intersected with the literature on work–home boundary management—which has been brought to the forefront due to the forced move to remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a qualitative field study of 55 in-depth interviews with global workers from a large organization headquartered in the Nordics, we found that global workers drew on sociomaterial affordances to manage both global work and work–home boundaries through strategies of boundary support and boundary collapse. Although the shift to remote work created challenges due to boundary collapse, it presented new spatiotemporal affordances that led to unexpected benefits for both global work and work–life boundary management. The findings have implications for global work, remote work, and the future of work more broadly.

Response to Symposium on Awkward Rituals

Abstract In this response to the symposium on Awkward Rituals, Logan responds to questions such as “do her subjects know that they are awkward?” “are awkward rituals effective?” “is this a theoretical or a historical intervention?” and “what is the role of American exceptionalism in this argument?” In response to these questions the author looks towards a future of ritual studies in which we might take seriously the limits of a scholars’ temporal and geographical boundaries while also building new genealogies of ritual as a category of analysis and practice grounded in historical exchanges.

The university without walls

Abstract My concern in this article is how the university might become more distributed, less concentrated in particular places and times, and more permeable to different sorts of interests. In order to do this, I have written a partly autobiographical reflection on an attempt to practice the work of the university differently. It is the early story of a sort of ‘research institute’ which is attempting to take the problems of its city region seriously and find ways to connect the resources of a large elite university to many other organisations in its locality. In theoretical terms, the article uses the idea of ‘social infrastructure’ as a way of thinking about how an institution operates beyond its imagined temporal and spatial boundaries and co-produces with people who have different identities and capacities.

Crossing the Line: Redrawing Legacies of Racial Representation in Watson and Holmes:

Abstract: The 2013 graphic novel Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black rewrites Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) as the story of two young Black men solving crimes in modern-day New York City. The adaptation challenges traditional Victorian national borders by highlighting the interimperial, white supremacist connections Doyle’s works promote between Britain and the United States. Furthermore, it crosses Victorian temporal boundaries by evoking Doyle’s racialized theorization of a mind-body hierarchy and the impact of this broader Victorian dogma on contemporary experiences of lived blackness. The formal complexity of comics facilitates Study in Black ’s restaging and rejection of blackness as abject materiality in the Sherlock Holmes stories and their original illustrations. This self-conscious and densely allusive redrawing of Doyle’s novel presses upon readers the burden and insights of Black double consciousness, theorized at the ostensible end of the Victorian period.

Gene expression and wildlife health: varied interpretations based on perspective

We evaluated wildlife population health from the perspective of statistical means vs. variances. We outlined the choices necessary to provide the framework for our study. These consisted of spatial and temporal boundaries (e.g., choice of sentinel species, populations, time frame), measurement techniques (molecular to population level), and appropriate statistical analyses. We chose to assess the health of 19 sea otter populations, located in the north Pacific from the Aleutian Islands, AK, to Santa Barbara, CA, and varying in population growth rates and length of occupancy. Our focal metric was gene expression (i.e., mRNA transcripts) data that we had previously generated across sea otter populations as a measure of population health. We used statistical methods with different approaches (i.e., means vs. variances) and examined the subsequent interpretive outcomes and how these influence our assessment of “health.” Interpretations based on analyses using variances versus means overlapped to some degree. In general, sea otter populations with low variation in gene expression were limited by food resources and at or near carrying capacity. In populations where the variation in gene expression was moderate or high, four out of five populations were increasing in abundance, or had been recently increasing. Where we had additional information on sources of stressors at the level of the population, we were able to draw inferences from those stressors to specific gene expression results. For example, gene expression patterns of sea otters from Western Prince William Sound were consistent with long term exposure to petroleum hydrocarbons, whereas in Kachemak Bay, patterns were consistent with exposure to algal toxins. Ultimately, determination of population or ecosystem health will be most informative when multiple metrics are examined across disciplines in the context of specific scenarios and goals.

California's harvested wood products: A time-dependent assessment of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions

Following life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, this study presents a state-level estimation of embodied carbon of wood products harvested in 2019 from California and subsequently processed, manufactured, transported, used, and disposed at the end-of-life (EoL). In a conventional static approach to LCA, all GHG emissions were aggregated and considered to occur at year 0 of the given time horizon (500 years in this study) and used a static characterization factor (CF). In dynamic LCA, GHG emissions occurring in different years were considered, and their global warming impact (GWI) was determined using a time-dependent CF over the selected time horizon of 500 years. Four scenarios were developed to examine the impact of EoL choices on GWI. It was found that dynamic GWI for all scenarios ranged from 0.27 to 0.93 million tonne CO₂e, which were 45–73 % lower than those estimated with static LCA approach, indicating that the static LCA approach could lead to an underestimation of the benefits of substituting wood for non-wood products, compared to those based on dynamic LCA approach. This analysis also demonstrated that the choice of EoL treatment option is a key factor affecting the estimated GWI as it directly determines the annual emission of GHGs released into atmosphere and subsequently their warming effect depending on the time harvested wood products (HWPs) spend in the horizon of assessment. Overall, the dynamic LCA performed in this study enabled more robust interpretations of embodied carbon by including temporal boundaries associated with the HWPs life cycle.

Imagining the next pandemic: Finnish preparedness for chronic transboundary crises before and during COVID‐19

AbstractBefore the COVID‐19 pandemic, infectious disease experts had postulated that the next pandemic is only a matter of time, and Finland, among other nations, had prepared for it. Yet the COVID‐19 pandemic crossed the customary political, functional, and temporal boundaries of crisis management to a surprising degree. This study analyses pandemic preparedness among Finnish infectious disease experts at the central government level before and during the COVID‐19 pandemic (2017–2021). The study is based on interview material, participant observation in the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare's infectious disease unit in 2017, and health security‐related document analysis. By analyzing expert perceptions of preparedness in two points of time, the study provides insights on the challenges that increasingly transboundary crises have posed for preparedness efforts. The experts perceived that pandemic preparedness would benefit from a more generic approach to planning and from more comprehensive risk assessments and policy advice. The analysis shows that Finnish crisis management had overlooked the extent of transboundedness of present‐day crises and is lacking consideration of how crises turn into chronic conditions that deplete capacities over time. The crisis man.agement regime needs to develop structures to better analyze systemic risks and to extend its timeframe to cover long‐term crises.

Expanded travel: using creative capital and ICT to extend the temporal boundaries of tourism experiences

ABSTRACT This article explores the concept of ‘expanded travel’, which harnesses the potential of new technologies and creativity to extend tourism experiences temporally beyond the travellers’ synchronous, face-to-face stay at their destination while enhancing their active engagement with local communities. This concept – still emergent within academic literature – was put into practice preliminarily in 2019 by cultural consultancy firm Kalimera Estudio and travel agency Altaïr Viatges. By taking a detailed look at expanded travel, we aim to define it, understand its implications for stakeholders, and assess its transformative potential. To this end, the article first sets out a conceptual framework for expanded travel, drawing upon its key concepts (experience, creativity, ICT and co-creation). We then present in-depth qualitative research combining semi-structured interviews and case analyses. Our findings provide detailed insight into the characteristics and dimensions of expanded travel, its key components and the stakeholders involved. Finally, we outline pertinent future considerations and possible lines for follow-up research.

‘A Poem Made Flesh’: Necromancing the Sovereignty Goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood

This essay explores the role of the sovereignty goddess in Emma Donoghue’s Hood (1995) and its protagonist’s efforts to come to terms with the death of her newly deceased girlfriend. Taking its impetus from Donoghue’s self-characterization as a literary ‘grave robber’, this essay examines how Hood’s protagonist, Pen, necromances the sovereignty goddess in an effort to produce and legitimize a recognizable lesbian subject in late twentieth-century Ireland. Framing Donoghue’s queer, feminist engagement with the goddess in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of the ‘chronotope’ – a narratological device that expresses a novel’s interfused time and space – this essay illustrates how Pen’s posthumous re-construction of her partner, Cara, comes to function as an anthropomorphic chronotope, whose body delineates the temporal, geographical, and generic boundaries of the novel. At the same time, drawing on Kristevan notions of abjection, it also traces how the simulacrum of Cara’s corpse decays across the novel, and explores the implications of this dissolution on the viability of the queer sovereignty mode the novel envisages. Refiguring the novel as a gothic tale about lesbian love, death, and grief, this essay demonstrates how Hood deploys an abject sovereignty goddess to both deconstruct the nightmare of Ireland’s social and cultural history, and produce inchoate, utopian daydreams for the nation’s future. In doing so, it argues that Hood performs a post-mortem on both Cara’s memory and the sovereignty tradition itself, resurrecting the goddess to mourn the Irish canon’s hetero-patriarchal sovereignty tradition, even as it facilitates the necromantic conversion of Ireland into a queer nation.

Carbon neutrality of forest biomass for bioenergy: a scoping review

The exploitation of forest biomass for bioenergy is commonly perceived as part of a broad strategy for climate change mitigation due to the view that forest biomass is carbon neutral. The aims of this study are to distinguish the most widely used definition of carbon neutrality and to identify the most frequently discussed aspects of the concept of carbon neutrality. This research is conducted in the form of a scoping review. The results of the scoping review demonstrated that there is no generally accepted definition of carbon neutrality. Eight main concepts of carbon neutrality were identified. The most frequently discussed aspects of the carbon neutrality concept were temporal and spatial boundaries, scenario-based assumptions, and the source of biomass feedstock. This research provides a comprehensive summary of the concept of carbon neutrality and contributes to the debate regarding forest biomass exploitation for bioenergy.

Re-imagining the Spatial and Temporal: A Detailed Study of the Narrative Structure of The Shadow Lines

In The Shadow Lines (1988), Amitav Ghosh, by employing the technique of a non-linear memory narrative, challenges and questions the dehumanised constructs of society and critically examines the concept of borders and nation. This research paper provides a detailed study of the innovative and fluid narrative created by Amitav Ghosh in which he re-imagines the spatial and temporal boundaries with the help of memory montages. In this novel the narrator traverses physically and psychologically over a span of forty years and analyses the heterotopic spaces and pathological effect of violence, partition and war on the marginal groups which suffer from oppression, displacement, exploitation and loss of language and culture.

Presenteeism Is Reloaded and Ready for Further Research – A Commentary on Priebe, J. and Hägerbäumer, M. (2023)

Presenteeism Is Reloaded and Ready for Further Research – A Commentary on Priebe, J. and Hägerbäumer, M. (2023)

Fundamental Asymmetries between Spatial and Temporal Boundaries in Electromagnetics

Time-varying materials bring an extra degree of design freedom compared to their conventional time-invariant counterparts. However, few discussions have focused on the underlying physical difference between spatial and temporal boundaries. In this letter, we thoroughly investigate those differences from the perspective of conservation laws. By doing so, the building blocks of optics and electromagnetics such as the reflection law, Snell’s law, and Fresnel’s equations can be analogously derived in a temporal context, but with completely different interpretations. Furthermore, we study the unique features of temporal boundaries, such as their nonconformance to energy conservation and causality.

Insights into Batch Selection for Event-Camera Motion Estimation.

Event cameras measure scene changes with high temporal resolutions, making them well-suited for visual motion estimation. The activation of pixels results in an asynchronous stream of digital data (events), which rolls continuously over time without the discrete temporal boundaries typical of frame-based cameras (where a data packet or frame is emitted at a fixed temporal rate). As such, it is not trivial to define a priori how to group/accumulate events in a way that is sufficient for computation. The suitable number of events can greatly vary for different environments, motion patterns, and tasks. In this paper, we use neural networks for rotational motion estimation as a scenario to investigate the appropriate selection of event batches to populate input tensors. Our results show that batch selection has a large impact on the results: training should be performed on a wide variety of different batches, regardless of the batch selection method; a simple fixed-time window is a good choice for inference with respect to fixed-count batches, and it also demonstrates comparable performance to more complex methods. Our initial hypothesis that a minimal amount of events is required to estimate motion (as in contrast maximization) is not valid when estimating motion with a neural network.

Global history in two chronotopes: Time, identity and the practical past in Nagasaki, Japan, 1990 and 2006

ABSTRACT This article compares two recent expositions held in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1990 and 2006. Both expositions responded to structural economic changes related to deindustrialization that prompted reidentifications with the city’s history as a maritime trade hub in early modern Japan. To compare two temporally laced identities that emerged from this turning point, I distinguish each exposition’s dominant chronotope. The 1990 Journey Exposition is characterized by Tabi (Journey)-time, which departs from a distant past to transit through a disappearing present towards a utopian future where Nagasaki has once again become an international port. The 2006 Saruku Expo is characterized by Saruku (Strolling)-time, which introspectively rediscovers Nagasaki’s local heritage within the present while imagining a changeless future, erasing the temporal divisions formative of Tabi-time. If Tabi-time is national time derived from national expositions, Saruku-time is local time derived from heritage and memory. These chronotopes are characterized by different arrangements of exposition grounds and different mobilities that visitors were expected to perform on their fairgrounds. The Journey Exposition spatially delineated Nagasaki into future and past zones, whereas the Saruku Expo featured a series of wandering strolls that drew no clear temporal boundaries. Visitors in Tabi-time engaged in epic, romantic voyages across national borders, whereas visitors in Saruku-time displaced themselves locally in an inquisitive, slow-paced manner. The article draws from exposition documents like guides and official records as well as a local town magazine to argue that the formal organization of time can be practically utilized for economic and identity-building purposes as well as politically contested between different parties. It also develops recent scholarship in Theory of History such as Hayden White’s concept of the ‘practical past’ and recent theorizations on the disorder of postmodern time.

A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW: THE IMPACT OF PROJECT-BASED LEARNING MODEL IMPLEMENTATION ON HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS' LEARNING OUTCOMES ASSESSED THROUGH VOSViewer IN THE GOOGLE SCHOLAR DATABASE

Education involves the dynamic exchange between educators and students in the instructional context. Conversely, project-based learning represents an instructional paradigm that integrates projects into the learning journey, with these projects encompassing both individual and group undertakings. Collaboratively pursued within defined temporal boundaries, such projects culminate in concrete outcomes. This study seeks to investigate the potential impact of project-based learning approaches on the participation of secondary school students. The systematic literature review method is employed to comprehensively evaluate existing research in this domain. By exploring the effects of project-based learning, the study sheds light on its role in enhancing student engagement and learning outcomes. This investigation contributes to the ongoing discourse on innovative pedagogical strategies and their efficacy in the context of modern education.

Cyanobacteria and Algal-Based Biological Life Support System (BLSS) and Planetary Surface Atmospheric Revitalizing Bioreactor Brief Concept Review.

Exploring austere environments required a reimagining of resource acquisition and utilization. Cyanobacterial in situ resources utilization (ISRU) and biological life support system (BLSS) bioreactors have been proposed to allow crewed space missions to extend beyond the temporal boundaries that current vehicle mass capacities allow. Many cyanobacteria and other microscopic organisms evolved during a period of Earth's history that was marked by very harsh conditions, requiring robust biochemical systems to ensure survival. Some species work wonderfully in a bioweathering capacity (siderophilic), and others are widely used for their nutritional power (non-siderophilic). Playing to each of their strengths and having them grow and feed off of each other is the basis for the proposed idea for a series of three bioreactors, starting from regolith processing and proceeding to nutritional products, gaseous liberation, and biofuel production. In this paper, we discuss what that three reactor system will look like, with the main emphasis on the nutritional stage.

Sociomateriality and the metaphysics of accounting information systems: Revisiting agential realism

This paper is a response to Weber’s (2020) call for further debate on the (potential) contribution of agential realism for the understanding of the content and functioning of accounting information systems (AIS) (Weber, 2020). Contrary to Weber’s conclusions, we suggest that agential realism can make important contributions to AIS studies. In order to realize such contributions we have to acknowledge that agential realism is a metaphysical framework rather than a theory or epistemology. Its potential contributions should be set against the potential contributions stemming from the metaphysical framework that is dominant in AIS research: representationalism. In representationalism, for the purpose of creating a knowledge base for a distant ‘knower’ who acts on the basis of such knowledge, accounting information systems are assumed to represent or provide information about a reality that is ‘out there’. In agential realism, accounting is assumed to be performative in (re)configuring local and temporal boundaries between meaningful positions for humans and non-humans. Rather than putting the human subject (the knower) at the centre of the stage, an agential realist account of accounting foregrounds accounting practices in their interrelation with other practices. It acknowledges that accounting participates in the (re)configuring of a sociomaterial world.

Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe by Ruth Balint

<i>Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe</i> by Ruth Balint