Timescapes of Waiting explores the intersections of temporality and space by examining various manifestations of spatial (im-)mobility. The individual articles approach these spaces from a variety of academic perspectives – including the realms of history, architecture, law and literary and cultural studies – in order to probe the fluid relationships between power, time and space. The contributors offer discussion and analysis of waiting spaces like ante-chambers, prisons, hospitals, and refugee camps, and also of more elusive spaces such as communities and nation-states. Contributors: Olaf Berwald, Elise Brault-Dreux, Richard Hardack, Kerstin Howaldt, Robin Kellermann, Amanda Lagji, Margaret Olin, Helmut Puff, Katrin Röder, Christoph Singer, Cornelia Wächter, Robert Wirth.
The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research. The Introduction and Chapters 5, 6, and 8 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
The politics and governance of Jordan’s Azraq camp for Syrian refugees Azraq refugee camp, built in 2014 and host to forty thousand refugees, is one of two official humanitarian refugee camps for Syrian refugees in Jordan. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp investigates the relationship between time and power in Azraq, asking how a politics of time shapes, limits, or enables everyday life for the displaced and for aid workers. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, carried out during 2017–2018, the book challenges the perceptions of Azraq as the ‘ideal’ refugee camp. Melissa Gatter argues that the camp operates as a ‘nine-to-five emergency’ where mundane bureaucratic procedures serve to sustain a power system in which refugees are socialized to endure a cynical wait—both for everyday services and for their return—without expectations for a better outcome. Time and Power in Azraq Refugee Camp also explores how refugees navigate this system, both in the day-to-day and over years, by evaluating various layers of waiting as they affect refugee perceptions of time in the camp—not only in the present, but the past, near future, and far future. Far from an ‘ideal’ camp, Azraq and its politics of time constitute a cruel reality in which a power system meant to aid refugees is one that suppresses, foreclosing futures that it is supposed to preserve.
Digital technologies are having a profound effect on the temporalities of individuals, households and organisations. We now expect to be able to instantly source a vast array of information at any time and from anywhere, as well as buy goods with the click of a button and have them delivered within hours, while time management apps and locative media have altered how everyday scheduling and mobility unfolds. Digital Timescapes makes the case that we have transitioned to an era where the production and experience of time is qualitatively different to the pre-digital era. Rob Kitchin provides a synoptic account of this transition, charting how digital technologies, in a wide range of manifestations, are reconfiguring everyday temporalities. Attention is focused on the temporalities associated with six sets of everyday practices: history and memory; politics and policy; governance and governmentality; mobility and logistics; planning and development; and work and labour. Critically, how to challenge and reorder digitally mediated temporal power is examined through the development of an ethics of temporal care and temporal justice. Conceptually and empirically rich, Digital Timescapes is an essential guide to our new temporal regime. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Human Geography, and History and Memory Studies, as well as those who are interested in how digital technologies are transforming society.
The “meantime” represents the gap between what is past and the unknown future. When considered as waiting, the meantime is defined as a period of suspension to be endured. By contrast, the contributors of this volume understand it as a space of “the possible” where calculation coexists with uncertainty, promises with disappointment, and imminence with deferral. Attending to the temporalities of emerging rather than settled facts, they put the stress on the temporal tactics, social commitments, material connections, dispositional orientations, and affective circuits that emerge in the meantime even in the most desperate times.
Place: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice explores tensions between global cosmopolitanism and local practices in the new media environment. This edited collection of work by practitioners and scholars emphasises political issues raised by artists working in an indigenous cultural setting. Indigenous epistemologies provide sophisticated structures for negotiating belonging among communities who may become widely dispersed from their homelands. New media, by contrast, demonstrates biases toward the the dislocated: a cosmopolitanism implicitly located in the urban, where communities form and fragment in “virtual” environments. Nonetheless, questions of belonging and identification remain for those of us who use new media networks. Through analysis of a range of contemporary art and film projects, and tracking recent developments in cultural theory, the book provides diverse perspectives on how long-held attachments to place are transforming in the new media context.
Analyzes interviews with students, teachers, and administrators to develop a new set of literacies essential for student success in the digital age. To read Johns work is to take on the role of a patient listener A book, like a piece of music, is scored for time, and I feel Time to Write is scored adagio. I believe that Time to Write can be read as a critique of [the] time-chopping approach to educationand an argument for presence, for being fully open to experience, for being there To do good work, we must enter something like island time or what John calls existential timeor what is sometimes called flow when we lose, at least temporarily, a sense of clock time. from the Foreword by Thomas Newkirk Twenty-five years ago, John Sylvester Lofty studied the influence of cultural time values on students resistance to writing instruction in an isolated Maine fishing community. For the new edition of Time to Write, Lofty returned to the island to consider how social and educational developments in the intervening years may have affected both local culture and attitudes toward education. Lofty discovered how the island time values that previously informed students literacy learning have been transformed by outside influences, including technology, social media, and the influx of new residents from urban areas. Building on the ethnographic findings of the original study, the new edition analyzes the current conflict between the digital age time values of constant connections and instant communication, and those of school-based literacy. Lofty examines the new literacies now essential for students in a technologically connected world, both those who aspire to continue the traditional island work of lobster fishing, and for the many who now choose to pursue other careers and attend college on the mainland.
The chapters in this book grapple in varying ways with Barbara Adam's concept of timescapes, which provides a powerful metaphor that extends the imagery of landscapes to enable an understanding of time as entwined with space, conceptually drawn and constituted experientially. Space-time is deeply relational, contextual and experiential, forming overarching narratives of higher education, its purpose and its future. As timescapes become in/visibilised and subsumed, in various ways and in different contexts, into hegemonic discourses of individual responsibility and choice, new temporal framings must then be carefully re-negotiated and self-managed by students and teachers. The chapters thus draw on theoretical and empirical contributions to examine intersecting pressures and [im]possibilities across different timescapes in higher education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Teaching in Higher Education.
Much of the work done on the Post45 literary field carries an implicitly Americanist perspective. Even the name of the field suggests a certain literary history, with certain assumptions and blind spots about national spaces, identities, and histories. But what would Post45 look like when considered from outside of the United States? How do the current contours of the field exclude certain voices, either in the United States or elsewhere in the world? And how would such new perspectives shift the beginning and possible endpoint of that literary period? What new narratives of the contemporary emerge if we begin telling the story in a different year or from a different national or global perspective? This collection attempts to re-frame the discussions in Post45 by engaging with non-American writers, texts, and perspectives. Additionally, productive conversations emerge by attempting to think of canonical American writers like Mark Twain and Ishmael Reed from other national and global perspectives. The authors consider both the ways texts themselves as well as their reception histories approach and challenge our understandings of the contemporary. Ultimately, the collection interrogates prevailing narratives of history, culture, identity, and space within the Post45 field. In so doing, it re-considers the historical periodization of the field, which currently covers approximately 75 years of literary history. The resulting essays thus work towards a new intertwined narrative about what defines the contemporary and how national and global literatures fit into that moment of world history.
This critical study explicates the complex and elusive fiction of John Fowles in terms of the tensions between time and timelessness. The author introduces insights gained from recent scientific and interdisciplinary studies of the apprehension of temporality and constructs a model for the hierarchy of levels of time in fiction.
