[Commlist] CFP The Material Life of TimeOnline

We are very pleased to announce our call for papers for the next 
Temporal  Belongings conference. Please share widely and get in touch if 
you have any questions!


  *The Material Life of Time*
  *The second international*
  *Temporal Belongings conference*
  *15th-17th March 2021, Online via QiQo Chat*

*Call for papers*

Much of the time of our lives is given to us by the relationships, 
properties and movements of worldly materialities. Atmospheric carbon 
has irrevocably transformed agricultural time (Kassam et al 2018), 
microplastics are queering reproductive time (Davis 2015), dissolvable 
sutures have remade the time of health, while rare earth minerals make 
possible the mobile phones at the heart of debates around acceleration 
and time squeeze (Wajcman 2008). In all of these ways and more, we see 
material objects — their uses, cost, manufacture, changing composition 
and characteristics — at the heart of modern debates about how time 
should be used, lived and valued.

A deeper recognition of the material lives of time thus attunes us to 
questions of how times are being made, where its materials are coming 
from, who or what is being displaced in the process, and what kinds of 
material practices are being called forth. How does the global race for 
resources in a time of climate breakdown, including for oil, gas, arable 
land and fresh water, make new times of migration, colonialism and 
dispossession? How are new bio- and medical technologies affecting 
embodied temporalities? How are particular generational, political or 
bureaucratic times out-of-synch (or not) with geological times, 
biological times or ecological times, and what are the consequences? 
What kind of resonance do concepts such as ‘modernity’, 
‘post-modernity’, ‘growth’, ‘recession’, ‘crisis’ and ‘acceleration’ 
take on from this perspective? What kinds of speculative futures are 
being produced and for whom (Keeling 2019)?

‘Materialising’ time also works back on concepts, approaches and methods 
for studying time by calling into question the dualistic treatment of 
‘social time’ and ‘natural time’ which has structured a significant 
proportion of work on time (Adam 1994). We are asked to  rethink key 
temporal concepts by attending more closely to their material basis and 
the ways these materials remain, morph, wear away and disappear with 
changing environments and socialities, “not in a relation of linear 
unfolding, but threaded through one another in a nonlinear enfolding of 
spacetimemattering” (Barad 2010). Another set of questions thus revolves 
around how to study time in its complexity, the difficulties that 
disciplinarity presents, and what to make of the continual rediscovery 
that time is not unitary and objective, but multiple and situated.

Working in collaboration with the Lifetimes 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=a8171d91a7&e=603ed4b8c4>and 
the Waiting Times 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=6c76b9e0fb&e=603ed4b8c4>projects 
and the Sydney Environment Institute 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=e81c13aea7&e=603ed4b8c4>, 
this Temporal Belongings conference aims to bring together scholars, 
researchers and practitioners interested in the socialities and 
materialities of time in order to explore how each is shaped by the 
other. Our network continues its interest in playing with the 
traditional time of academic collaboration and so we will include a 
mixture of presentation styles, and plenty of time for discussion. 
Collaborative, participant driven sessions will allow themes emerging 
from the presentations to be synthesised and explored in greater depth. 
Our conference will take place online via the QiQoChat platform 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=3016242656&e=603ed4b8c4>. 
Using Zoom as its video meeting provider, QiQo enables attendees to move 
between a number of online meetings easily and to set up their own 
discussions or meetings as needed. Our focus will be on facilitating 
live synchronous sessions and opportunities for planned and spontaneous 
interaction with other attendees. You can click through the links above 
to find out more about how the conference will be organised and the 
platform.

Proposals are sought for lightning talks (5 mins), traditional papers 
(15 mins), collective sessions such as roundtables and world cafe 
approaches (1.5 hours), or alternative presentation/participatory 
formats (1.5 hours). Proposals for single panels or streams of multiple 
panels focusing on a relevant theme or approach are also welcome.

*Confirmed keynote speakers for the conference include:*
Karim-Aly S. Kassam (Cornell)
Karan Barad (UC Santa Cruz)
/information on further keynotes to follow/

*Contributions might address topics such as:*
Time technologies, temporal media, natural and human history, time 
scales and life scales; times in/of the body as it is categorised in all 
its forms; materialities of colonial time; unequal global 
interdependencies in the making of time; crisis of historical time, 
climate change times, species times, aging, speed and acceleration, 
slowness and waiting, temporal rhythms, materialities of time and 
health; materials, time and care; clashes between material practices of 
time; speculative futures of time;  science fiction imaginaries; the 
role of non-material materials.

/Please note that these suggestions are only prompts. We also welcome 
contributions which think outside, around and counter to the framing 
we’ve presented here./

Abstracts should be submitted online 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=e3d7e4ea64&e=603ed4b8c4>by 
the*16th of October 2020*. We will aim to give notification of decisions 
by December 2020. More details are available on the conference website: 
http://www.temporalbelongings.org/the-material-life-of-time.html 
<https://temporalbelongings.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u=d011167f83c7e4d6f0c99696b&id=481d05ff30&e=603ed4b8c4>

Please send any queries to (temporalbelongings /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(temporalbelongings /at/ gmail.com)>

Michelle Bastian
Lisa Baraitser
Thom van Dooren
Helge Jordheim
Hugo Reinert
Laura Salisbury
/Conference Committee/

/Copyright © 2020 Temporal Belongings, All rights reserved./
You are receiving this email because you signed up via our mailing list 
or attended one of our events.

*Our mailing address is:*

Temporal Belongings

c/o Michelle Bastian, ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art, University of 
Edinburgh

20-22 Chambers Street

Edinburgh, Midlothian EH1 1JZ

United Kingdom

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