[Linganth] AAA Panel 2017: When Time Matters

[Karl Swinehart]

Proposal for AAA 2017  Please circulate! If you're interested, please send
your title and  250-word abstract to anna.browneribeiro at louisville.edu and
karl.swinehart at louisville.edu by March 17, 2017.


AAA 2017 Panel CFP:  When Time Matters

When does time matter in our work? Temporalities impact our respective
research sites and methodological approaches at varied scales:  agricultural
cycles, lunar and solar calendrics, tidal regimes, second-to-second turns
at talk or pauses of silence all provide at once structure and sites of
agency. There is simultaneously widespread recognition of time and space
being interconnected and also the notion that they can be treated as
independent variables.

When is time Matter? In other words, when and how is time palpable? When
are metrics for time felt and enacted? Alternately, when time seems to
disappear, whether as unquestioned permanence or apparently
inconsequential, what makes this so? Temporal frameworks don’t simply exist
but are created, and are not unitary, but are often multiple, in degrees of
lamination, synchrony or dissonance. When are temporal frameworks layered
or latticed, and when does it matter if these are sequential or
simultaneous? We are interested in temporal frameworks’ production, and the
consequences of their intercalation, or disarticulation. The possibility of
calibrating action across time and space presupposes notions of
synchronicity, yet this is not always the case. For example, capitalist
economies may presuppose particular seasonalities that, while presumed
universal, vary greatly across locales and ecologies.

We are interested in cases investigating structural connections between
state power, infrastructure, production, and, more broadly, the
politicization of time. For example, the sense that temporalities are
essentially Western or Other may not be a pre-existing state-of-affairs,
but a mutually constitutive relational result of encounter. Moments in
which social actors aspire to radical social change have often seen
calendars and clocks reset to mark the epoch as new. At checkpoints, in
bureaucracies, and across diverse institutional contexts, the control of
others’ time may serve as an exercise of power. In recognizing the temporal
dimensions of differential access to goods and services, we begin to
consider a political economy of time. Particularly in colonial and
post-colonial contexts, frameworks for time have served as sites of
contestation and negotiation. What are the latches and who are the brokers
between different temporal orders, and how do these contribute toward
the negotiation
of different temporalities?

Across our subfields we’ve developed and adopted varied analytic constructs
such as the palimpsest, chronotope, longue durée, and conjuncture to
address these questions. In this panel we invite the exploration of their
potentials, limitations and alternatives.
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