Political and transformative uses of time

Abstract

Taking time as a political relation and politics as a temporal one, our focus in this Special Issue is on contemporary case studies from a variety of geographical and political contexts. Using a wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches from across the social sciences, we use a temporal lens to study structures of power and inequality. Attentive to uncertainty, indeterminacy, and contingency, the contributions to this issue are especially attuned to the political salience of collectively produced temporal agency. Based on empirical case studies, the articles in this collection apply, critique, refine, and extend existing temporal concepts to uncover the political and transformative uses of time. Conscious of time's intimate entanglement with power, inequality, social transformation, and social justice, we hope to contribute a politically relevant, empirically and conceptually rich collection of articles to critical time studies and to studies of politics, social change, and social movements.

Introduction to the special issue

Our current historical moment is characterized by widening socio-economic inequalities, the rise of neo-fascist movements and authoritarianism worldwide, the continuation and lasting effects of neo-imperialist and colonialist regimes, ongoing genocides and crimes against humanity, a global pandemic, the climate emergency and related ecological disasters, and extinction of species. These dreadful currents are met with resistance and collective struggles for social change, justice, and equality.

In this global context, the question of the future (re-)emerged as a major topic of scholarly attention. Inherently a temporal category, this renewed interest in the future is apparent in the proliferation of special issues dedicated to the future across the social sciences: Reparative Futures (Myers et al., 2024), Imagined Futures in Social Movements (Yates et al., 2024), Political Ecologies of the Future (Bluwstein and De Rosa, 2024), Sociologies of the Future and the Future of Sociology (Halford and Southerton, 2023) are only a handful of examples from 2023 to 2024. ¹ Focusing attention on possible futures, alternative futures, and on expectations, fears, and hopes regarding these futures is not only an academic, but also a political responsibility, not least because the future seems bleak, dystopian, uncertain, precarious, and unsafe for the majority of the planet's population.

The same anxieties that have garnered the rich scholarly attention to futures mentioned above—from eco-anxiety to anxieties stemming from the mainstreaming of far-right politics—have driven us to co-edit this special issue on the political and transformative uses of time. We agree with Freeman (2022) that time is “foremostly a vector of power, wielded to produce and maintain exploitative relations between people” (p. 25) and therefore, that time is deeply imbricated in issues of social justice. We also agree with Sharma's (2022) conviction that those of us who are committed to social justice and transformation need to consider “the material systems that produce time in particular ways, and the power relations that these systems engender and support” (p. 27). It is with this commitment to studying time as a political relation, as a social construct that is enmeshed with power and social transformation that we embarked on putting this special issue together.

In this special issue we sought to pull the analysis of time out of the past–present–future sequence in order to analyze how people, institutions, and regimes engage with time. We take time as social, malleable, and multidirectional and not merely as the constant, progressive flow of existence in which we live. As a relational field of contention, time harbors a multiplicity of conflicting and contested temporalities, which makes it a site of potentially transformative social and political struggles. The “uses” of time that is in the title of this special issue does not refer to a functionalist or essentialist understanding of time—which might conceive of time as a singular entity that can be passed around depending on the needs of social order—but to a relational approach that takes time as a socially and politically constructed, malleable, and changeable medium of power.

Following this conception of time allows us to go beyond analyses that stop at “looking back” for historical understanding, “looking forward” for understanding the future, or short- and long-term analyses that take time as duration to examine phenomena “over time.” Without denying the significance of such analyses and the interconnectedness of the past, the present, and the future, we center time itself as an object of inquiry rather than leaving it running in the background as the pervasive, natural, linear succession of existence. Doing so is not only aligned with the objectives of Time & Society but, and perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this special issue, it is also amenable to studying human (as well as temporal and political) agency. This approach to time makes room for attending to power dynamics and social change. The articles in this issue are thus concerned with how time is experienced, practiced, narrated, coordinated, synchronized or desynchronized, negotiated, and contested, in explicitly political and potentially transformative ways.

That time is a social construct is not news to the readers of this journal. Our goal with this special issue is not to claim originality but to open up space for focused attention on the various ways in which time is also a political construct, just as politics is inherently temporal. At the more abstract level, this collection of articles endeavors to uncover the intricate co-constitution of “time” and “politics,” or the temporal and the political, at various levels, in different social contexts, and in different ways. As is elaborated by Felix Ringel in his thoughtful Afterword to this issue, examining this relationship between “time” and “politics” whereby each is “co-constituted in relation to one another” adds to our understanding of both domains, and “demands academic scrutiny.”

More specifically, deploying a temporal lens onto the political and a political lens onto the temporal entails taking the collective nature of both domains of social life seriously. Hence, in this special issue, we make explicit the “political and transformative uses of time” through a collective understanding of temporal agency and the (co-)construction of time and politics, variously conceptualized by each author. A multiplicity of manners in which time is collectively “tricked” by a variety of social groups and actors exemplify how both the knowledge of time and the contents of it (Ringel, 2016: 25) are put to transformative “use” at the individual, national, and global level.

We kept this issue “undisciplined” (Sharma, 2022): it is unbounded by academic disciplines, a specific method, or geographical and political context. It hosts contributions from across the social sciences including anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and politics, with porous and permeable boundaries in their temporal analyses. Rhythmanalysis, textual analysis, and ethnography are some of the methods used throughout the special issue, in contexts ranging from Bulgarian-language online social spaces to populist Britain to authoritarian Turkey.

As we elaborate in the next two sections of this Introduction, what bounds the articles together is their contemporary cases ranging from social media platforms during COVID-19 to populist temporal narratives in Britain, from scenario projects in the African continent to contemporary social movements in the United States, Canada, Scotland, and Turkey. They are also bound by their attention to inequality, power, and transformative social change. They share an understanding of “time” and “politics,” and how they constitute one another. They focus on temporal agency and its specifically collective co-production.

This diverse collection of articles contributes to our understanding of the politicization of time and of temporal agency as political agency. All contributions in this special issue expand the study of time in politics and the politics of time by singling out the temporal dimension of sociopolitical processes. Explicitly or implicitly, all of these articles identify and denaturalize existing temporal orders while also examining the ways in which these orders are resisted or negotiated. As such, our contributions are not only to “time studies” but more particularly to “critical time studies” (Huebener, 2015) to the extent that we conceive of temporality as a political relation and a useful lens to study structures of power and inequality.

Key themes

Although contextually, methodologically, and theoretically diverse, these articles share a common approach to time and politics, with several threads running through the special issue. Readers will find that these articles are based on different national and regional contexts, albeit all within our current neoliberal-capitalist global setting. They all draw from contemporary case studies. In keeping with the spirit of our times and our subject matter, they are attentive to notions of uncertainty, contingency, indeterminacy, unpredictability, urgency, and the open-endedness of the future.

Our approach to time and politics is shared across the special issue. The relational and social understanding of time that we outlined in the introduction above is at work in these articles, where authors examine a multiplicity of intersecting, conflicting, or contested temporalities, collectively produced. Their conception of politics is also shared, in the sense that politics is observed as an everyday, multi-actor, multisited, multiscalar activity that involves, but goes beyond, conventional institutional politics (e.g. parliaments, politicians, political parties, etc.). Therefore, a wide range of social settings and/or processes forms the basis of analysis: the home, online social platforms, social movements, protest events, national referenda, national narratives, nongovernmental organizations and the public sector, the police, and interpersonal relations are taken as loci of politics.

One of the most pronounced themes in this issue is processes of temporal alignment and de-alignment, worded in numerous ways. Alongside temporal alignment (Genova), readers will encounter the terms temporal synchronization (Genova); temporal coordination (Ruggero; Gokmenoglu and Manley); temporal orientation and future-orientation (Gokmenoglu and Manley; Mische and Mart); and temporal order (Forkert and Nahaboo), as well as temporal conflict (Wood); clashing or intersecting multiple temporalities (Ruggero; Forkert and Nahaboo; Mische and Mart; Gokmenoglu and Manley); temporal difference and mismatch (Ruggero; Wood); temporal diversity, asynchronicity, and dissonance (Genova); and temporal splitting (Mische and Mart), among others. Grappling with converging and diverging temporalities, we contend that these collective efforts at coordinating or decoupling multiple, overlapping, or differing temporalities are themselves political acts.

Strategies or techniques of temporal coordination are another common theme. These strategies span from narrative or discursive framings, future imaginations, scenarios, and predictions to Facebook posts, online interactions, time stamps, and political organizing and action. Each article contextualizes these strategies and discusses their implications for a range of sociopolitical issues such as democracy, colonialism, social movements, and social inequalities more broadly. Collective exertions of temporal agency crystallize in these strategies of temporal coordination.

Lastly, the articles in this collection engage in empirically driven conceptual development based on their respective cases. Whether it is refinement, extension, application, or critical analysis of existing concepts, readers of the special issue will find the conceptual work that has been done intellectually stimulating. Some of these concepts are “time work” (Gokmenoglu and Manley), “temporal conflicts” (Wood), “time troubles” (Ruggero; Wood), “presentism,” and “the left behind” (Forkert and Nahaboo), to name a few. We believe that these refinements of existing concepts will benefit “critical time studies” as well as scholars of social movements, politics, cultural studies, and other related fields.

Thematic overview of the articles

The issue brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss temporal conflicts, negotiations, and collaborations, focusing on the ways in which temporal imaginaries, experiences, practices, and narratives are used to motivate, coordinate, stall, or enable political action and social transformation. Approaching “time” as a contested terrain of social and political relations, the articles collected in this special issue examine transformative and political uses of time across a variety of regional, social, and political contexts.

Social movements are one of the sites where political contestations over time manifest themselves most clearly. In this issue, Gokmenoglu and Manley examine how future-oriented experiences of time drive strategic political action in a comparative analysis of temporal dynamics of political organizing, and particularly political contestation over possible futures, during volatile times in contemporary Turkey and Scotland. Similarly, Ruggero makes a theoretical contribution by analyzing how US activists coordinated temporal orientations for strategic purposes as they responded to and navigated uncertainty during a transformative event in the days following the 2020 US Presidential election. Wood analyzes how temporal conflict manifests in interactions between police and protestors in the United States and Canada, demonstrating how confrontations are shaped by (and through) the distinct temporal properties of protesters and police, and how those temporal properties are strategically managed in order to gain leverage over opponents.

Temporal imaginaries, constructs, and narratives are also a vector for political and social transformation. In this issue, Mische and Mart analyze scenario planning as a site of temporal contestation. Examining public interest scenario projects seeking to intervene in urgent problems related to democracy, development, peacebuilding, and climate change, Mische and Mart show how reform actors’ narratives of temporality make and unmake institutions, attribute blame and responsibility, build coalitions, and initiate structural transformation. Forkert and Nahaboo refine our understanding of chronopolitics in their analysis of the “Left Behind”—an archetypal British constituency, typified as white, working-class men from the deindustrialized North—as a temporal construct, organized through presentism, and its political invocation in support of an anti-EU and anti-immigrant British populism. Finally, Genova proposes the home as a site of transformative struggles, highlighting how the intersection and interaction of differing temporal experiences in a Bulgarian-language Facebook group function as a foundation for the articulation of sociopolitical differences.

While the articles in this collection explore the interplay of time and politics across various social, organizational, and cultural contexts, several key themes emerge from their shared emphasis on the co-constitutive nature of conceptions of time and conceptions of politics.

Genova and Forkert and Nahaboo delve into temporal diversity and multiscalarity, showing how various temporal regimes intersect in both domestic and broader sociopolitical contexts. Genova’s focus on rhythmanalysis illustrates the polyrhythmic nature of everyday life, while Forkert and Nahaboo analyze how populist politics construct temporal narratives like the “left behind” to sustain power structures.

The articles from Ruggero and from Wood emphasize the strategic use of temporalities in political struggles, highlighting temporal dynamics in movement coalitions and movement-police interactions, focusing on how intersecting and clashing temporalities can either enable or hinder collective action. Wood's exploration of “temporal conflict” and “time troubles” demonstrates how temporal mismatches are tactically leveraged by different actors for political gain. The future as a contested temporal horizon appears prominently in the works of Gokmenoglu and Manley and Mische and Mart. Their articles discuss how future-oriented narratives, including utopian and dystopian visions, serve as drivers for political action. Mische and Mart's analysis of scenario methodologies underscores the role of foresight technologies in managing uncertainties and shaping political deliberations.

Ruggero and Gokmenoglu and Manley highlight the role of temporal adaptation in collective strategizing. Whether through “time work” or contingency planning, these articles reveal how social movements and political actors navigate disruptions and unpredictability to maintain strategic leverage. Forkert and Nahaboo's exploration of chronopolitics critiques how temporal constructs obscure sociopolitical inequalities. They argue that dominant temporal frameworks, often mobilized through nationalist narratives, marginalize minority histories and perpetuate structural inequities. The emotional dimension of temporal experiences, as discussed by Wood and Gokmenoglu and Manley, reveals how emotions interact with temporal mismatches to shape political outcomes. Emotional responses to temporal dissonance can mobilize action or deepen conflict.

In sum, these articles collectively demonstrate how political phenomena are inherently temporal and vice versa, with each shaping and being shaped by the other. Understanding this co-constitution provides crucial insights into the dynamics of power, inequalities, resistance, and social change.