Paper proposals for a panel on time-tricking are invited as part of the ASA (Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth) 2015 conference, which will take place at the University of Exeter, 13th-16th April 2015.
Please find below the panel abstract. The CfP closes at midnight on the 1st December 2014. Paper proposals can be submitted here.
Time-Tricking: Human temporal engagements, devices and strategies
This panel looks at symbiotic relationships that human beings develop with time. We ask about the ethnographic tools that we need in order to be able to communicate these symbiotic relationships; about the ways in which these relationships could be analytically unpacked and about the emergent knowledge produced.
Is time-tricking – the development of personal, intersubjective and collective strategies to stretch and bend time in accordance to our needs, preoccupations and deadlines – a form of symbiosis? Whilst time seems to be relentless in how much (or little) time it gives us, human beings often need devices to ‘trick’ time in order to facilitate everyday activities, evocatively draw on moments of the distant past or contemplate alternative futures. Particularly in an era regarded as being defined by acceleration (Eriksen 2001) and by irreversible changes, such as the depletion of natural energy resources (Mitchell 2013), the creativity in tricking time is encouraged and admired. What does this say about the dominant forms of temporality of this era, about the institutions that are legitimated through the enactment of these temporalities (Greenhouse 1996), and about our relationships with them?
We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, questions of alternative temporalities, time-keeping, silencing and accelerating time, and the topological experience of time.
Could time-tricking be a form of methodological mutualism between anthropology and other disciplines? We invite contributors to reflect on the ways in which our methodology is changing in relation to our own temporal constraints in contemporary research practices.
Roxana Morosanu (Loughborough University)
Felix Ringel (University of Vienna)
Daniel Knight (Durham University)