ENACTING TEMPORALITY

Sunday, April 21st, 2024


Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus, Baltimore, MD

Time, as a mode of configuring the social, has long been of scholarly concern— such as Durkheim (1912)’s illustration of how regular rhythmic collective gathering provokes the idea of the social in individuals or, more recently, Elizabeth Freeman’s (2019) illustration of how senses of time are instrumental to becoming social in a mode she calls hypersociability, a way of imagining queerness not as antirelational, but as hypersocial. Further, scholars have attended to the temporal also as a force that acts upon individuals, offering valuable insights for understanding how power shapes human encounters; Foucalt famously illustrated how discipline penetrates and temporalizes the human body (1979), while Rob Nixon’s slow violence helped shift understandings of violence from spectacular and exceptional to gradual and cumulative (2011). In this sense, the temporal is a force that acts upon the social—shaping bodies and experiences. Yet, scholars such as Chloe Ahmann (2018) and Kemi Adeyemi (2019) have argued that time can also be an area for creative action—for political strategy, recalibration, or refusal. In this conference, we invite scholars to explore subjective experiences of time: how time is not only experienced, but also actively manipulated in everyday life. We ask: How might we understand time not simply as a force that acts upon a subject, but as a mode of action; a site—or strategy—of strategic manipulation?

Such explorations in this conference may consider questions related to the use of time in the configuration of the social, and/or as a mode of enacting politics. One may also consider how material technologies like the photographic and cinematic shape subjective experiences of time; how techniques like close-ups, slow motion, and editing illuminate ways that new media techniques may be used as a mode of refiguring time (thinking with Benjamin, Bergson or Deleuze). Further, we as anthropologists also configure time; Fabian (2011) illustrates how spatial and temporal configurations position interlocutors as Other. In writing-up, we make cuts, introduce or cast off an ethnographic present, and institute rhythms and pacing. What might tracking these different kinds of cuts, manipulations, and strategies of and into the temporal tell us about what it is to live within a particular form of life?

Finally, we invite scholars to take up the difficulty of assigning agency in relation to the temporal. We ask: how might we problematize distinctions between the very notion of time-as-acting versus time-as-acted-upon? How might unsettling the temporal as an actor versus subject open up more ways to understand subjective experiences of time? How do delays, errors, accidents, stoppages, hindrances, repetitions play in one’s engagement with time? How do different modalities like deferrance, endurance, avoidance engage with time?

Encouraged topics and themes include but are not limited to:
State-making, Law, and Governance
Race and Racialization
Relation, Kinship, and Belonging
Loss, Memory, Trauma, Melancholia, Nostalgia
Media, Events, News, Photography, Film
Ethnography and the Temporal
Mending, Healing, Remembering 
Temporal as Palimpsest
Modern, Premodern, Postmodern times
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene
History, Historiography, Writing Histories

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: The conference will take place on Sunday, April 21st at Johns Hopkins University. We encourage submissions from graduate students across disciplines as well as artists and practitioners. Please submit abstracts (< 250 words) through this form by February 15, 2024. Submission of full papers or presentations is required two weeks prior to the start of the conference.