Abstract
This article engages the intersecting sociologies of adolescence and time, two concepts that in their modern, universalized iterations are born of a proximate historical moment. It suggests that conceptual studies of being young – in this case, studies of adolescence, but also, broadly conceived, of childhood and youth – can be deepened through inquiry into the definitional orthodoxies of time. Brought about in large part by the new temporal relations of subjectivity, sociality and community endemic to life online, new approaches to the scholarship of time have of late blossomed in cultural studies. The article asks, Can new orientations to time – that concept so foundational to definitional notions of adolescence – complicate contemporary understandings about what it means to be young? And can new orientations to time re-energize scholarship focused on documenting the various terms by which adolescence takes form as a social construction, particularly as global imperatives to managerialize and over-determine young people’s lives intensify?
To define adolescence is to appeal to notions of time. Whether in the popular sphere or in competing conceptions of scholarship, we sketch the variability of meanings and practices of adolescence in relation to the invariability of time’s advance. Adolescence – a contested, relative, socially constructed assemblage of discourses and practices that bears heavily upon modern experiences of being young – is alternately considered as follows:
The time between childhood and adulthood – an empirical reality – as per various legal and institutional definitions (Venkatesh and Kassimir, 2007);
An interim movement through micro ages and stages, as per the dictates of developmental psychology (Erikson, 1968);
A temporary phase of becoming, as in a long tradition of literature (D’Eramo, 2003; Kristeva, 1990);
A historically contingent invention of the current moment – lived in real ways – as per various critical youth studies orientations spanning the social sciences and humanities (France, 2007);
A temporal text – culturally malleable and fluid in its representations – as per various ‘post’ stances (Saul, 2010).
These orientations put into practice different sets of presumptions and discourses about the meanings of adolescence. Yet each agrees, even if tacitly, on a fundamental orthodoxy: that time – empirical time, the time of the clock and the calendar, the seconds/minutes/hours/days/months/years according to which we measure a life lived – is organic to all definitions of being young once these experiences take on the designation ‘adolescence’.
New approaches to the study of time have of late blossomed in cultural studies (see Sharma, 2014). In part brought about by the emerging temporal relations of subjectivity, sociality and community endemic to life online, many of these have sought to rescue notions of time from their empirical orthodoxies. Questions arise: Can new orientations to time – that concept so foundational to definitional notions of adolescence – complicate contemporary understandings about what it means to be young? And can new orientations to time re-energize scholarship focused on documenting the various terms by which adolescence takes form as a social construction? Discourses about the social construction of adolescence form an intellectually vital subfield of interdisciplinary child and youth studies that is often revelatory to the uninitiated: university students first encountering scholarship on adolescence, educational practitioners and youth workers variously wedded to institutional definitions of being young, and the broader public. Yet at the level of scholarship, this subfield now seems in such agreement in its temporal presumptions and conclusions that stagnancy arguably threatens it.
In what follows, I contextualize relevant scholarship on social constructions of adolescence and of time, two intertwined concepts that in their modern iterations are born of a proximate historical moment. I then orient readers to emerging cultural studies of time, before considering how these can open up new possibilities for thinking about the meanings and makings of adolescence in the contemporary moment. In particular, I argue that among the intersecting social categories that tend to frame modern perceptions and experiences of being young – categories like culture, geography, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race and otherwise – time is an increasingly relevant yet largely unarticulated category of intersectionality. Developing a more expansive vocabulary for articulating time’s socio-cultural workings on adolescence can therefore contribute to more complicated understandings of young people, as well as to potentials for more just and humane relations with them, especially as global imperatives to managerialize and over-determine their lives intensify.
The social construction of adolescence
To speak of adolescence from a social constructionist perspective is to call into question a series of conventionalities pertaining to experiences and definitions of being young. Bringing attention to socio-historical and cultural processes that trace the conditions of the creation of adolescence points to possibilities for making new meanings about a category and set of experiences we often take for granted (see France, 2007; Graham, 2004; Lesko, 2001; Popkewitz, 2013).
Interested scholars have long undertaken this work in communications with each other (see, for example, Côté’s (1994) Adolescent Storm and Stress: An Evaluation of the Mead-Freeman Controversy; see also Ayman-Nolley and Taira, 2000; Bessant, 2008). Here, they have staked out the terms of the invented nature of adolescence, as well as explored the category’s effects on over-determining notions of being young (Lesko, 2001). These explorations rarely impact directly the material conditions of existence for large groups of marginalized young people around the globe, for whom emancipation from alienating social practices more aptly depends on concerted action that moves beyond the realm of discourse. Yet, this intellectual work remains ethically imperative. It creates possibilities for imagining less deterministic, more complicated and more emancipatory views about what it means to be young, and so holds the potential to liberate young people from the social meanings imposed upon them.
A worthwhile if initially simplistic entry point in orienting publics towards considering adolescence as a social construction is to look at its categorical instabilities along legal, social and psychological lines. Depending upon the jurisdiction, and often within the same one, a young person might be conferred legal adulthood – with accordant permissions to vote, drive, consume alcohol or otherwise – at any of a number of different chronological ages, a signal that our legal institutions are not in agreement in delineating movements from adolescence to adulthood. Socially, our discourses also often reflect this confusion, as in commonplace public editorializing about cases where separate adolescents of identical ages might, say, commit violent crimes or engage in illicit sexual behaviour. In the first instance, talk often turns to whether they should be tried as adults; in the second, our laments often evoke childhood notions of lost innocence, signalling how context overlays chronology in our constructions of adolescence. And with respect to psychologically and pedagogically sanctioned indicators of normal development and self-making, our cultural narratives and testimonies, always abundant, are forever informing us that imperatives aimed at distilling human experience into empirical and uniform stabilities are exiguous (see Graham, 2004).
It can be argued that these instabilities are such because in its current iterations the category adolescence is a fairly recent invention. By and large, there was an absence of any universalized conception of adolescence in pre-modern times (Lesko, 2001). Notions of modern, universalized adolescence unevenly came into being through a confluence of factors around the turn of the 20th century. In intellectual spheres, post-Darwinian concerns with evolutionary theory and its potential social applications spurred the work of scholars – psychologists especially – who helped to bring modern versions of the category into existence (Lesko, 2001). For example, there is the work of G. Stanley Hall, perhaps the most influential among these, whose pseudo-scientific version of recapitulation theory – the idea that one human’s life cycle mirrors the life cycle of all of humanity, in which case the evolutionary momentum of adolescents is weak and therefore needs to be carefully managed – helped to set in place fixed behavioural determinants for defining a universalized adolescence (Goosens, 2006; Hall, 1904).
Likewise, in social and political spheres, the emerging domestic realities of life in much of the industrially developed and developing world at the turn of the last century – as well as the attendant imperial ambitions of rapidly modernizing nations – matched well with new intellectual assertions about adolescence. For this was a time of heightened industrialization and urbanization in which the administration of newly centralized populations helped to define and fix into place new legal definitions of personhood (Young-Bruehl, 1996). More specifically, this was a time in which labour was increasingly turned into a commodity to be bought and sold, bringing with it the emergence of new forms of child labour, then laws enacted to combat it, which helped legislate the category ‘adolescence’ into existence (France, 2007). In addition, commoditized labour rendered economic survival increasingly reliant on mitigating the size of one’s family rather than growing it, thus helping to create new middle and leisure classes of which non-working young people – adolescents – were now among its constituents (Young-Bruehl, 1996). A significant result here was that regular attendance within compulsory schools grew rapidly for larger swaths of young people than ever before, elongating the category childhood and more resolutely bringing modern adolescence – now supported by broad institutional backing – into being (see, for example, Comacchio, 2002).
Matching these new socio-economic realities were emerging youth cultures, which reached their apex in the years following the Second World War (Danesi, 2003). Drawing from a long since articulated tradition of literary romanticism (which well preceded the psychological invention of adolescence in positing the ‘storm and stress’ of youth), these cultures – and the accompanying growth of culture industries like film, television and marketing – now brought into public consciousness a new variant of behaviourally and socially irrefutable adolescent called the teenager, this one a primarily consuming subject, and then a later counter-culture that emerged both in confluence and reaction to these industries (Danesi, 2003; Hebdige, 1979).
The cumulative result was and is an invented narrative of the current moment, forever reinforced in the cultural imagination (Stern, 2005), legitimized by retrospective science (Ayman-Nolley and Taira, 2000; Bessant, 2008) and often taken to be absolute even if the historical record suggests otherwise. Largely institutionalized in schools, supported by adult care and adult tax dollars, and arguably a source of casual public disdain because of it, our current narrative of adolescence positions young people through pejoratives like storm and stress, lost innocence, indulgence, becoming, depression, disengagement, self-absorption, lack of discipline, raging hormones, peer pressure and identity crisis (Lesko, 2001; Stern, 2005).
Theorizing time
Popular orientations to time derived from Western traditions tend to conceptualize it as empirical and absolute (Hassan and Purser, 2007). And the version of time that these orientations are most often wedded to – ClockTime – fulfils this conception well (see Postill’s, 2002 ‘clock and calendar time (CCT)’). Our allegiance to it has the effect of synchronizing our experiences of life into discrete, standardized units, disciplining us through its universalizing precision. Yet as with the construction of adolescence, the popular subsuming of all understandings of time to one particularized version of it, ClockTime, like the subsuming of all experiences of youth to adolescence, is tenuous. This is not to say that our recent socio-historical allegiances to ClockTime do not come with obvious social utilities. But merely that it is worth contemplating the space beyond ClockTime’s over-determinations in deepening our understandings of a concept so central to modern life and, for our purposes, to adolescence. As such, we can subject time to the same conditions of inquiry to which we have subjected adolescence.
There have long been attempts to measure with acute precision the indeterminate progress of existence into notions of past, present and future (see Adam, 2004; Hassan and Purser, 2007). Some source the early, tangible formation of these attempts to the construction of the first ‘geared clockwork instruments’ more than 2000 years ago (McCready, 2001: 158). Others to the 14th century, when the mechanical clock first began to spread throughout Europe (Holford-Strevens, 2005), eventually normalizing a mechanistic means of separating the day into 24 roughly equal hours and displacing more natural ‘signs and events’ as signifiers of temporality (Rose and Witty, 2010). And still others to the 17th century, when relationships to ClockTime now began to regulate broad swaths of human activity (Hoffman 2009, cited in Rose and Witty, 2010). This mode of regulation reached its apex over the course of the 20th century (Lesko, 2001), at which point standardized time assumed its place as an underlying, universal system against which human lives and structures came to be lived and measured.
It is noteworthy that imperatives to universalize notions of time emerged alongside imperatives to universalize notions of adolescence, or that a ‘theology of cohesion’ (McLuhan, 1964: 138) whose function worked to quantify and objectify human efficiencies through rigid notions of time rendered amenable the invention of a life stage wholly determined by it. The legacy of ClockTime in synchronizing and communalizing the actions and perceptions of humans is, correspondingly, an important constituent of modernity, an important constituent in helping to bring modern notions of human subjectivity into existence. It fact, it might be argued that no factor has contributed more implicitly and totally to the global colonization of modern human subjects and their institutions than ClockTime. This is certainly in evidence with respect to the making of modern, time-bound adolescence as a life stage. How, then, did time come to be so ubiquitous?
As with the effects of industrialization and urbanization on constructions of adolescence, universal ClockTime owes its pervasiveness in part to the global rise of modern capitalist systems in which industrial labour and output first began to organize vast spheres of human life (Hassan, 2003; Lee and Liebenau, 2000). For here, time, what with its amenability to isolating greater and greater exactitudes of output, emerged as a dominant unit of measurement in determining human and commercial productivity. With capitalism came the notion that one’s time could be transferred into a monetized exchange value, intimately intertwining what had been an abstract concept with a new notion of human subjectivity (Hassan, 2007). To be human was now innately to possess a means of currency measurable and offerable through time. This was an uneven currency in which human differences and potentials were largely reduced to measurements in time and one’s worth became in part determined by how valuable one’s time was deemed (see Hassan and Purser, 2007).
Important advances in technology – also very much tied to the growth of modern versions of capitalism and industry at the turn of the 20th century – were likewise relevant to the universalization of ClockTime. Here, new modes of transportation and communication, as well as expanded infrastructures that supported these – ever-expansive railway construction and travel, innovations in electrical and radio-telegraphy, the invention of the telephone, early air travel – came increasingly to rely on the precision offered by uniform conceptions of time and of scheduling across and among disparate territories and people (Lesko, 2001). Importantly, much of this uniformity came through the form of imposition, often of oppressed people. Perhaps the most notable example here comes with the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884 in which 25 nations resolved to separate the territories of the globe into time zones – establishing related variants of world standard time – and fixed into meaning the beginning and lengths of a precise day (Lee and Liebenau, 2000; Lesko, 2001).
Standardized notions of time were equally prized within increasing segments of intellectual and popular life, which now equated the precisions of ClockTime with the best impulses of classical science and enlightenment thinking: empiricism, rationality and externalization of knowledge (Adam, 2004). All were values embedded in clock time, and all were important imperatives of modern knowledge construction. The intellectual currencies of Darwinian evolution and like scholarship here again played a part, whereby allegiances to statehood and accompanying imperialist aims now enjoyed new legitimacies alongside more longstanding communal, religious and epistemological loyalties (Lesko, 2001).
And yet it bears mentioning that inquiries into alternate meanings of time – even if only on the peripheries of popular consciousness and attendant cultural practices – have been a feature of intellectual life since before the onset of ClockTime. These deliberations have taken shape in disciplines ranging from philosophy to physics to anthropology. This is not to mention the fact that there have always been, and continue to exist, entire cultural systems with populations where time takes on properties radically antithetical to its mechanized versions (Postill, 2002; Raybeck, 1992). And it is likewise not to mention that there exists a long and suspect tradition of scholarship purporting to study the practices of these and attendant cultural Others through a colonial gaze that constructs them, pejoratively, according to past–future notions of time (see Fabian, 1991, 2002).
With respect to the particular time concerns of this inquiry, Adam’s (2004) social analysis of time has much to offer the pursuit of alternative meanings of time useful for later theorizing about adolescence. Adam (1992) tells us that time need not be solely interpreted as a quantitative entity, but can be conceived qualitatively and relationally, whereby a ‘multiple complexity of times bears on our lives simultaneously’ (p. 81). Like Latour (1993), whose notion of temporality as ‘the interpretation of time’s passage’ (p. 68) attempts to distinguish between experiences of time and its mechanized abstractions, Adam (2004) suggests that one way to see time is as a contextually situated attribute, not wholly reducible to one unit of measurement but an experience in a series of overlapping pluralities. Adam’s (2004) theory of timescapes here provides a useful entry point of understanding. Hassan and Purser (2007), who also work with a variant of the term, define it as ‘the intricate intersecting of rhythms, beats, sequences, beginnings and ends, growth and decay, birth and death, night and day, seasonality, memory, and so on that constitute the embedded temporality that is part of everything’ (p. 12).
This view of time – an attempt to rescue all of time from its reducibility to ClockTime – might be best gleaned through analogy. We can imagine that we are holding a picture. Perhaps it is a snapshot of a small family in front of their home, the sun shining brightly behind them, a parked car to the side and a broad lawn of grass and trees extending to the photograph’s various edges. Although this is merely a photograph and all of the imagery we see exists on what is empirically a small, flat surface, our spatial awareness is sophisticated enough to separate the features of this imagery into different spatial planes. We understand that there are people in the foreground, a sun in the background, a car to the side and so on. In viewing this photograph, our default position is to account for the spatial complexities of what we see. And yet when it comes to the photograph’s intersecting temporal qualities, our default position is arguably to distil the entire image to the capturing of one moment in time.
Yet, a timescaped understanding would encourage us to perform a different set of practices. It would encourage us to consider, say, the seeming eternity of the sun in relation to the finite lives of the family members in front of it, the seasonal degradations and renewals of the blades of grass at the sides of the photo in relation to the growth and history of the trees that line it, the fleeting and intersecting temporal experiences of the family members – gleaned through their interior lives, their dream lives, their memories, their structured work lives – in relation to the variously ageing inorganic materials that hold in place their home or their car, the history of decay of the road upon which said car sits, the projections about the near and distant futures of all of the above and so on. In this light, it seems much more automatic and intuitive to explore the variability of our spatial rather than temporal perceptions. And yet these aforementioned temporal relationships very much exist even if habitually ignored – they are affecting, consequential and significant. This is perhaps the trick that our continued socially constructed allegiances to ClockTime have played on us – it is a trick of negation that precludes more complete understandings of our temporal lives.
The cultural studies of time
Of late, a newer series of orientations to time has gained scholarly momentum, and their potential influences in expanding temporal literacies of childhood and youth are significant (see Hassan and Purser, 2007; Sharma, 2014; Tomlinson, 2007). Often referred to as cultural studies of time, these newer orientations have been largely brought about by the material conditions of communication of our current historical moment. I refer here to new modes of community and culture making, and to new modes of subsequent sociality and subjectivity, brought about by the fact that a significant portion of our lives are now experienced in online spheres.
Whereas mechanical clocks once held communal sway, online life interrupts ClockTime’s hegemony. We can check our email now or later and communicate through various online profiles at our leisure, rendering communications asynchronous when once they were much more reliant on the communal precision of ClockTime. We can likewise attend meetings, consume goods and conduct work from various disparate locations and time zones, decoupling time-space intimacies and further softening the hold of ClockTime (although often creating new restrictions in its stead, as will be noted later on) (Crang, 2007; Hassan, 2003; Lee and Liebenau, 2000). Whereas we once consumed popular media in communal temporal patterns (receiving and reading the morning newspaper at proximate times, simultaneously tuning into radio newscasts, figuratively watching the latest television episodes together), we now do so increasingly on our own time, from remote and often mobile locations, none of which are reliant on ClockTime. We likewise can become temporarily changeable and transform into disembodied subjects online (Saul, 2012, 2014), and so make ourselves outside of the immediate temporal constraints of our physical worlds (just as we can achieve unwanted permanence online, permanence that the advance of clock time can’t remedy as it once might have (Ronson, 2015)). In addition, information is presented differently than it once was when existing online. It is stacked rather than integrated (Eriksen, 2007). This too suggests an altered temporal relation. This is to say that in older forms of print communication – pamphlets, books, magazines – information is presented to us in sequential units that theoretically match the ordered imperatives of clock time. The hypertexts of online communication offer us greater agency in creating and recreating these sequences.
Congruous with the above, a veritable lexicon of new time theories aimed at charting the temporal conditions of our current moment – related not only to online life but also to a range contemporary cultural concerns – now exists. In a recent, compelling work, Sharma (2014) notes a number of these, which she groups under the rubric of her attention to temporally focused ‘speed theories’. These include,
24/7 capitalism (Jonathan Crary), the chronoscopic society (Robert Hassan), fast capital (Ben Agger), the new temporalities of biopolitical production (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), the culture of acceleration (John Tomlinson), chronodystopia (John Armitage and Joanne Roberts), hypermodern times (Gilles Lipovetsky), liquid times (Zygmunt Bauman). (p. 5)
Sharma (2014) adds her own terminology to the preceding, coining the term ‘power chronography’ (p. 9) in an attempt to extend recent time theorizing and to address what she suggests is a persistent shortcoming in its articulations. To my mind, the term opens an interesting path for thinking about adolescence.
Sharma’s (2014) power chronography aims to account for how differential power relationships affect our contemporary experiences of time. Whereas the preponderance of recent scholarship on cultural studies of time assumes all-encompassing socio-cultural changes brought about by new relations of temporality, she suggests that these changes are experienced altogether differently by different human subjects based on their social locations, a fact often obscured by new time theorists in the exercise achieving theoretical coherence. ‘Time’, writes Sharma, ‘is worked on and experienced differently at the intersections of inequity’ (p. 14).
In support of this notion, Sharma (2014) holds up ethnographic exemplars like inquiry into new classes of global, corporate travellers and communicators living across time zones and seemingly unwedded to notions of ClockTime, in essence experiencing a temporal life qualitatively differently than has ever before been possible. She asks us to consider what peoples and structures uphold these new types of lifestyles. Here, we might alternately juxtapose, as she does, taxi drivers hyper-disciplined by traditional notions of monetized clock time (transporting those same prospective travellers and others) or the servers and cleaning staffs in all night airport lounges who have very different temporal relations to the spaces they occupy than do the global travellers they host.
Sharma’s (2014) point is that our relations to time differentially intersect with longstanding markers of social inclusion and exclusion, of privilege and oppression, in ways that our theorizing often does not adequately account for. Her project serves to point us in the direction of contemplating how multiple times, contested times, intersecting times and unequal relations of time coexist in contemporary human lives. To these concerns, we can overlay our own question: How do multiple, contested times coexist in the contemporary lives of young people, and what new possibilities for theorizing about them exist in addressing these questions?
Reconsidering notions of time in theorizing adolescence
Why is it important to reconsider time in theorizing notions of youth and adolescence? And how does a multi-perspectival orientation to time open up possibilities for thinking about the makings and meanings of adolescence in the current moment? In what follows, I initiate five responses, deliberating upon each with a view towards stimulating further inquiry.
A first response posits that we need to reconsider time because it is an under-explored site of socio-cultural intersectionality in studies of adolescence. It is commonplace to appeal to notions of intersectionality in differentiating and complexifying experiences of adolescence. In setting out to understand the subject positions and cultural locations of young people, we have become adept at addressing myriad interconnections rather than isolating socio-cultural variables: adept at addressing how, say, geography, gender and poverty intersect in the creation of global, childhood exploitation (Kristof and WuDunn, 2010); how ethnicity, gender and class can crosscut in influencing adolescent achievement in schools (Strand, 2014); how appeals to fleeting constructions of race can both make and unmake the popular cultures of young people (Dolby, 2001); and so on.
What studies of youth and adolescence often leave out, and thus leave intact, are the time-bound understandings that implicitly operate upon the categories of intersectionality we elevate. How, for example, do our allegiances to biological ClockTime – that pejorative mode of thinking about adolescence that universalizes assumptions about their behaviours based on the over-determinisms of biology – differentially position some cultures of youth in comparison with others (in which the anti-conformist behaviour of privileged young people is often tolerated while the same behaviour in racially and ethnically marginalized groups is criminalized)? How does our social preoccupation with achieving evolved futures and avoiding uncivilized pasts – that endless macro-assessment we make of humanity in relation to the ClockTime of history – get projected globally onto differentially located young people in inequitable ways? And can we begin to deconstruct the ubiquitous discourses we have in place that rely on invoking sequential ClockTime to regulate and discipline young people’s subjectivities? Failure to engage in inquiry that includes time as an interpretive site of intersectionality risks missing out on a key analytical feature in raising otherwise important issues about being young. A multi-perspectival orientation to time would begin to remedy this.
A second response posits that relations of time are a growing site of global adolescent inequity in the contemporary moment, and for this reason, it is imperative to reconsider its workings in our theorizing. This is to say that what persists amidst the global economic cycles of growth and recession that characterize late capitalism are profound and sustained inequalities of opportunity for young people around the world (Mundy, 2008). Yet, these inequalities are not merely spatially determined – they shape and are shaped by temporally determined attributes as well.
A most striking example here concerns questions of Internet access. For all of the new emancipatory temporal possibilities that online access can offer young people – possibilities like abilities to transcend immediate space/time to encounter far-away learning, friendships, communities and cultures (Boyd, 2008); abilities to partially reimagine oneself through disembodied subject-making and identity practices (Saul, 2012, 2014); and opportunities to access education as a means of better protecting oneself from the exploitative dangers of these possibilities – commonly cited statistics suggest that over half of the world’s 7 billion people do not have Internet access. This is hardly a testament to inclusion, to the McLuhan-esque global village we are now increasingly said to be a part of. Predictably, it is people in those regions of the world without the infrastructures to support online connectivity who often fall on the wrong side of this divide and who miss out on the opportunities afforded to those on the right side. Furthermore, among populations in those regions of the globe where Internet access is far-reaching, we now know that an additional ‘competencies divide’ operates to affect usage patterns (Warshauer and Matuchniak, 2010). Put simply, the privileged and affluent use online access in much more sophisticated, affecting and transformative ways than do the marginalized. The emancipatory temporal relations promised by online access are thus once again unevenly accessed.
Here, two abiding notions are important to note: the first is that even when young people gain increased access to online spheres, this comes with no guarantee that this access will be emancipatory or affirming; the second suggests that we should not assume that the denial of exposure to online life relegates young people to staid engagements with time. With respect to the first notion, there exists a wide body of literature suggesting that although online life now offers young people
emancipatory potentials … – toward new modes of self-expression, sharing, and community – it is by now well documented that these possibilities likewise share space with emerging forms of division and discrimination, in which long-standing makers of individual and social exclusion often find new articulations and momentums. (Saul, 2016: 157; see also Herring, 2008; Nakamura, 2006; Turkle, 2011; Willett, 2008)
With respect to the second notion, it is also prudent to note that one runs the risk of re-inscribing a colonial imperative when championing the online possibilities afforded to ‘modern’ youth over those ‘other’ youth denied such possibilities (Fabian, 2002). A multi-perspectival orientation to time would therefore recognize this pervasive aspect of temporal inequity and its complications – namely, that large swaths of young people around the globe are left out of new articulations of temporal life due to structural discrimination and inequities, but that those left out can be active agents in their own temporal makings – as part of an agenda of scholarship aiming to be responsive to the condition of being young today.
A third, related, response posits that attention to time offers us an important means of critique with respect to our over-idealizations of spatial realms when conducting social justice–oriented youth work and inquiry (Sharma, 2014). Sharma (2014) states as much when she writes that ‘the sharing of space does not guarantee the sharing of time’ (p. 22). She suggests that we often tend to be wedded to the idea that democratic principles are best achieved when people learn and share space together. This notion may be viable, but perhaps only to an extent. Sharma (2014) suggests that a spatial bias is often at work in our perceptions and analyses of democratic achievement. This is to say that even when we come together spatially (in political forums, in public leisure spaces, in educational contexts), each of us orients to time differently within said spaces, and these orientations are underlain by familiar socio-cultural factors that privilege some while dispossessing others. And so it is worthwhile to consider ways to invoke the temporal as a means of revealing and working with inequities in such instances. What this work therefore requires of us is a widened theoretical gaze, an acknowledgement that invisible temporal subtexts often occupy spaces of research and inquiry. Required in studying a school, a community organization or any culture of young people, then, is not just the acceptance of what is immediately perceptible to us about the workings of such a space, but inquiry into how time (in school, in leisure, at home) differentially bears upon the particular relations made within it. A multi-perspectival orientation to time would serve as a reminder that doing so is important in excavating deeper meanings about adolescence.
A fourth response posits that we need to consider time in more complex ways because our dominant institutions presuming to cater to young people tend not to do so, instead favouring the construction of time as a resource or productivity category (Adam, 2004; Rose and Witty, 2010). The workings of most schools offer a useful exemplar. Schools are usually organized according to a highly structured temporal day and calendar, fetishizing ClockTime in myriad ways (through daily scheduling, assignment structures, assessment timelines and so on). Many students of course do not thrive within such conditions – and for said students, it is often not the case that they are simply left to struggle. On the contrary, more and more educational ministries and boards have a variety of well-articulated measures and strategies to help their students meet the temporal demands of schooling (ubiquitous terms and matching policies like educational ‘modification’ and ‘accommodation’ bear this out). Consciousness of time in schools is thus very much in evidence. Yet, it bears asking what kinds of ‘time pedagogies’ tend to be valued in schools and what kinds of definitional presumptions about time are taken up as part of this valuing. And here what we often see – from well-meaning educators, it should be emphasized – is a markedly uncomplicated view of time (see Rose and Witty, 2010). This view sees it constituted as a resource category and sees the teaching of time management as a means of more closely embracing the structures and disciplines of ClockTime, of encouraging more obedient subjects.
This learned internalization of ClockTime of course carries forward in reifying temporal orientations to later life and work. And while this learning surely has a functionality within schools and social systems as constituted, its broad function is to preserve the social, economic and political status quo – and its attendant inequities – rather than to challenge it. A multi-perspectival orientation to time would therefore seek to rescue time from its often-impoverished institutional conceptions. It would instead encourage those working with young people to more critically encounter the socio-cultural and political structures and functions of time.
A final response, this by way of concluding, posits that staid orientations to time need to be reconsidered in work and theorizing about young people because young people continue to operate within highly structured temporal contexts, just as we continue to construct them according to highly structured temporal imaginaries. We have long since made adolescence according to the mechanistic functions of ClockTime, and institutions as well as popular perceptions continue to discipline them accordingly. And yet, as detailed earlier, contemporary life reveals increasing contexts within which contemporary relations of time are changing, within which the disciplining measures of ClockTime are receding. The danger here is to encounter these changes, their presumed emancipations from ClockTime tyranny, and the unknown direction they may take us, through uncritical or overly idealistic lenses. Given the totalizing effects of ClockTime on modern adolescence, the tendency to do so might be great. Yet, whatever new meanings about adolescence emerge on the other side of ClockTime, these will undoubtedly be a source of political contestation. This is already in evidence. The kinds of subjective and social realities that accompany the breakdown of ClockTime suggest new openings but also new closures. A work day less structured by ClockTime can often incur upon leisure rather than leave more time for it; new possibilities for self-making can often imprison adolescent selves in endless and dizzying projects of construction and reconstruction rather than liberate them otherwise; and those wishing to opt out of new time relations may find that they risk being left behind socially and economically – hardly a choice at all (Bauman, 2005; Lipovetsky, 2005). None of these alternatives are neutral – new imperatives to managerialize, to discipline and to dominate always inform them. In the case of young people – not yet adult, not yet citizens, ever marginalized – we can be sure that they will thus need critical advocacy through attendant scholarship and theorizing. A multi-perspectival approach to time offers an important avenue towards doing so.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.