[Commlist] Call for Papers · Chronopolitics: Politics of Time and Dissident Temporalities in Artistic Practices

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Call for Papers: Chronopolitics: Politics of Time and Dissident 
Temporalities in Artistic Practices
Journal of Science for Science and Technology of the Arts, vol. 18 n. 1
Guest Editors: Sara Castelo Branco, João Pedro Amorim & Daniel 
Ribas (School of Arts Research Center for Science and Technology of the 
Arts)
Deadline: February 21st 2026
Link: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/announcement/view/96 
<https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/jsta/announcement/view/96>

[No payment from the authors will be required.]

The concept of chronopolitics defines time as a physical phenomenon, 
which is concurrently represented, controlled, measured, and culturally 
organized as an instrument of power (Esposito & Becker 2023). By 
recognizing the complex multiplicity of times that shape our experience, 
the concept of chronopolitics has diverse senses and possible 
extensions, encompassing temporal politics that also influence 
understandings of gender, migration, class, geopolitics, or new 
technologies.

In this sense, chronopolitics can be described as an analysis into how 
politics relates to time, and how political actors and ideas use 
temporality and history (Clark 2019, Maier 1987). Paul Virilio (1991) 
stated that "we are in chronopolitics," based on the notion of 
'dromology': this concept affirms that the engine of modern power is 
simultaneity, acceleration, and instantaneity. Within this context, 
contemporary politics are also inseparable from the control of military, 
technological, and informational speeds that dominate territories, 
populations, and subjectivities. On the other hand, chronopolitics are 
also related to the governmentality and management of bodies, such as 
the control over the times of work, life, and reproduction (Foucault, 
1975). Consequently, it also has a connection with the question of 
identity, since identities exist because they are reiterated, and 
certain norms regulate the rhythm of these repetitions (Butler, 2004). 
But given the ideas of orientation, directionality, normative lines, and 
temporalities of heteronormativity time, queer life invents new times 
and produce insurgent temporalities (Ahmed, 2006). Similarly, the 
occupation of public space can involve collective times and a common 
time that challenges the accelerated, productivity, or disciplinary time 
of neoliberalism (Butler, 2004).

Since the late-nineteenth century, there has been a systematic 
development of techniques and apparatuses that capture perception and 
convert attention into a resource to be produced and exploited (Crary, 
1999). More recently, the evolution of audiovisual media and information 
networks has been characterized by the extension of an industrialization 
of memory, responsible for absorbing individual experiential flows into 
the broader flows of the programming industries (Stiegler, 2011). 
Control over these flows enables the modulation of the temporalities of 
consciousness and life, and thus of the understanding of the past and 
the shaping of future expectations (Stiegler, 2014). This modulation 
contributes to what Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes as a depletion of 
futurability, a condition in which the horizon of potentiality becomes 
increasingly foreclosed (Berardi, 2017). Another of its consequences has 
been the instability of attention. Rather than expressing nostalgia for 
a disciplinary model of contemplation, Claire Bishop argues that a range 
of artistic practices has emerged that deliberately mobilizes forms of 
“disordered attention”—non-normative regimes of perception shaped by 
digital media that register the political and cultural struggle over 
time and perception (Bishop, 2024).

Time as an instrument of power is also present in the post-colonial 
experience, which dominates not only territories and bodies – but also 
temporalities (Mbembe, 2011). The control of time – of possibilities, 
movements, and rhythms – is one of the central mechanisms of necro-power 
(Mbembe, 2019). From this perspective, migration also implies bodies 
that are situated in space and time, since bodies take shape as they 
move through the spaces. Another important chronopolitical issue is the 
way fossil capitalism accelerates geological time and destroys slow 
ecological temporalities. In Radical Futurisms (2023), T. J. Demos 
argues that the Anthropocene is not just an ecological crisis; it is a 
crisis of temporality – which produces threatened or non-existent 
futures, and creates temporal inequalities marked by class, race, and 
geopolitics. But, according to the author, art can be a laboratory for 
new temporalities and alternative futures. A device for imagining 
multi-temporal worlds.

Based on this framework, JSTA – Journal of Science and Technology of the 
Arts invites researchers and artists to submit original articles for the 
dossier Chronopolitics: Politics of Times and Dissident Temporalities in 
Artistic Practices, dedicated to exploring how dissenting times can be 
forms of resistance, prioritizing how these issues have been addressed 
in the field of artistic practices. In light of moments of ecological, 
political, and social collapse, this issue proposes a reflection on how 
the idea of ​​temporality can be critically addressed – especially in 
future perspectives.

Possible submission topics:
- Chrononormativity and dissident temporalities (queer, feminist, 
decolonial, indigenous and in community practices).
- Chronopolitics of memory and historical narrative.
- Politics of time in ecology and interrupted temporalities (absence of 
future).
- Neocolonialism, Anthropocene and unequal temporalities.
- Multitemporality, cosmopolitics and indigenous futurity.
- Temporal regimes as technologies of power.
- Temporalities of late modernity, acceleration and control societies.
- Time management in urban life, at work and in digital space.
- Temporalities of care and politics of the future.
- Interrupted temporalities: precariousness, dispossession, violence and 
states of exception.
- Philosophy of time and its political implications.
- Loss of natural rhythms; Compression of the past and future in the 
present.
- Digital temporalities and non-normative modes of attention.

References
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. 
Duke University Press.
Berardi, F. (2017). Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon 
of Possibility. Verso.
Bishop, C. (2024). Disordered Attention. How We Look at Art and 
Performance Today. Verso.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. 
Verso.
Clark, C. (2019). Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, 
from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich. Princeton University Press.
Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and 
Modern Culture. MIT Press.
Esposito, F., Becker, T. (ed.). (2023). “Chronopolitics: Time of 
Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time”, History and Theory 62, nº 4.
Foucault, M. (1975/1995). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the 
Prison. Penguin Random House.
Maier, C. S. (1987). “The Politics of Time: Changing Paradigms of 
Collective Time and Private Time in the Modern Era,” in Changing 
Boundaries of the Political: Essays on the Evolving Balance between the 
State and Society, Public and Private in Europe, ed. Charles S. Maier. 
Cambridge University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2011). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
Simpson, B., Kirtsoglou, E. (ed.) (2021). The Time of Anthropology: 
Studies of Contemporary Chronopolitics. Routledge.
Stiegler, B. (2011). Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the 
Question of Malaise. Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, B. (2014). Symbolic Misery, Volume 1: The 
Hyperindustrial Epoch. Polity.
Virilio, P. (1991). Lost Dimension. Semiotext(e).

For more information: (jpamorim /at/ ucp.pt)

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