In this paper, I consider the concept of trans dissociative time through the lens of madtime, aiming to understand how dissociative temporalities both structure the transnormative life narrative in ways that bind it to chrononormativity and can be leveraged to resist this narrative. I characterize three qualities of trans dissociative time: 1) frozen , as time is stopped or paused in the present; 2) split , as the lifespan is divided into multiple subsequent or simultaneous narratives; and 3) blurred , as temporal boundaries are made fuzzy or disoriented. I use the lived experiences of myself as a transmasculine nonbinary person and friends who are a trans system in conjunction with scholarship on Mad, trans, queer, and crip times to discuss the nuance of trans dissociative time as not only distressing and normalizing, but also a site ripe with possibilities for resistance to the sanism embedded in compulsory, normative linear temporalities.
Temporal patterns in energy demand are becoming increasingly central to managing supply and demand in energy systems based on renewables. While past research has used either time-use surveys or high-resolution electricity use data to examine associations between energy peaks and everyday practices, these sources are rarely combined. This paper combines time-use survey data, including practices and appliances, with hourly electricity use data to investigate the association between the timing of everyday practices and energy demand in Danish households. Although the datasets were collected in different years, their combination offers new insights into the temporal alignment between domestic practices and peak electricity consumption. Focusing on the 5 to 8 pm evening peak period, the study examines four key practices (relaxation, cooking, housework, and caring) and nine common appliances, including the TV, coffee machine, and dishwasher. The findings challenge conventional assumptions that associate evening electricity peaks primarily with dinner preparation. While cooking is the most frequently performed activity during peak hours (60%), its direct contribution to peak consumption appears limited. Instead, practices such as housework, often involving energy-intensive appliances, emerge as more significant contributors. This reframing directs analytical attention away from isolated appliance usage toward the temporal coordination of multiple, overlapping practices. By directly linking the timing of activities with observed electricity demand, the study shows that evening peak loads arise from the temporal coordination of overlapping practices rather than isolated appliances. The analysis reveals that housework, often involving several energy-intensive appliances, contributes more to peak demand than cooking, despite cooking being the most common activity during this period. This highlights the importance of understanding appliances as mediators within bundles of practice.
In this introduction to the special section, we outline the central questions that animate our concerns about the diverse forms that temporal turbulence is taking in the context of intensifying climate change and precipitous biodiversity loss: Does the contemporary conjuncture of 'colonial-ecological crisis' compel a more thoroughgoing review of ideas about time and temporality across the disciplines? What relationships exist between the long dur & eacute;e of European colonialism and ongoing environmental collapse in different parts of the world? How are dominant actors - legal, political and corporate - seeking to disable or dilute challenges to long-entrenched temporalities, both colonial and capitalist? And why is temporal multiplicity or 'pluriversality' so important in the contemporary conjuncture, not only for conceptualizing the world-historical processes that have precipitated this polycrisis but also for the possibility of new affective orientations and more creative policy innovations? As the four contributions to this special section demonstrate, albeit in relation to different institutions, in different registers and drawing on different disciplinary knowledges, there is an urgent need to both conceptualize and seek strategic solutions for the eco-political challenges of our time in more temporally plural, expansive, multi-directional, relational, moral and decolonial ways. While the climate crisis is often treated as a technical problem - or at least one amenable to forward-looking solutions that do not require wrestling with colonial pasts or neocolonial presents - the contributions to this special section all suggest otherwise. Taken together, they argue for a powerful reimagining of the temporal coordinates, assumptions and logics that characterize the present moment, and they gesture towards new temporal practices that might prove more genuinely responsible (and responsive) in the face of intensifying political, social and ecological turbulence.
This article examines how female employees experience temporal change under a four-day workweek in a childcare non-profit organisation. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, it analyses the lived temporal experience of reduced work-time. The findings reveal a paradox: while the four-day workweek promises temporal liberation, women's experiences often involve a form of temporal recolonisation, whereby free time is rapidly absorbed into existing webs of gendered obligations. The analysis shows how temporal interdependencies across work, family, and institutional schedules constrain how this time can be experienced, with inequalities amplified rather than reduced. Women with fewer resources face intensified temporal coordination burdens, while those with greater educational and economic capital navigate temporal tensions with more autonomy. Participants express ambivalence about changes organisationally framed as successful, revealing tensions between rest and productivity, autonomy and obligation, individual benefit and collective coordination. By developing the concept of temporal recolonisation, the article explains how work-time reduction, when detached from broader temporal ecologies and gendered expectations, can paradoxically reinforce the very inequalities it seeks to address. This contributes to scholarship on temporal inequality by showing that reduced working hours redistribute temporal resources unevenly, rather than simply creating free time.
This article examines how legal processes shape the pursuit of just energy transitions, highlighting the judiciary's role in balancing climate goals, Indigenous rights, and environmental justice. While court cases can play a crucial role in enabling Indigenous peoples to assert their rights, the outcomes hinge on the judiciary's ability to understand the cultural and relational significance of Saami reindeer herding. Using courtroom ethnography, I observed the & Oslash;yfjellet wind power court case in the Saami reindeer herding district of Jillen Njaarke S & iuml;jte. The article explores how Norwegian courts interpret and adjudicate culturally embedded claims to land and sustainability. Through a structural narrative analysis, the article identifies three interconnected narratives of temporal-hermeneutical injustice: establishing interpretive power through procedural exclusions, flattening relational Saami knowledge into administrative evidence, and marginalizing the ecological entanglements of land and herding routes. The analysis demonstrates how linear legal chronologies render Saami relationality legally unintelligible, perpetuating epistemic hierarchies. True justice requires reorienting collective interpretive resources to validate autonomous Indigenous temporalities, cosmologies, and onto-epistemologies, not as colonial contrasts but as sovereign frameworks. By positioning time as a structural site of power and resistance, this study advances scholarship on temporal-hermeneutical justice and energy transitions.
Rhythmanalysis and the way it is conducted is a theoretical concept and also a relatively novel framework using plural methodologies, often less grounded methods, on the border between various social sciences and philosophy. This paper elaborates on the rhythmanalytical approach developing a specific methodological framework that describes how to combine different, mostly empiric methods to achieve methodologically enriched results. The strength of such research is in the well thought-through combination and synergy of the methods used. It presents an empirical, methodological grasp on rhythmanalysis while it respects its phenomenological foundations and challenging character, as this field can always benefit from the updating of the methodological approaches.The paper describes the application of such a framework in the context of the recent urban development of the Sm & iacute;chov district in Prague. The focal point of the study, the Sm & iacute;chov train terminal, was explored for rhythm-related phenomena at the very beginning of a significant transformation of the railway station. Documentary analysis was accompanied by semi-structured interviews, structured observation as well as time-lapse photography. This paper explains the specifics of each method, explores how they complement each other and evaluates it by presenting its advantages, disadvantages and recommendations for future use. Furthermore, it coins the concept of rhythmic anchors and renders outlooks and tenets applicable to future rhythmanalytical explorations including ethical considerations related to rhythmanalytical inquiries.
Language prescription - political efforts to produce and maintain language norms - has been integral to modern governance. Pursuits of linguistic homogeneity can be traced through numerous pedagogical programmes, reform projects, and ventures of national consolidation. This essay argues that historical cases of orthographic standardization - that is, prescribed protocols of spelling - must be understood as examples of temporal synchronization. By mapping out the principal incentives of a comprehensive spelling reform carried out in early twentieth-century Sweden, the analysis connects the rationality of standardization to situated experiences of temporal disorder, asynchronous rhythms, and conflicting timescapes. The central argument is that orthographic reforms produce unified historical time in order to align a series of conflicting temporalities. Implementing analytical frameworks of temporal multiplicity and synchronization, the article accentuates a previously understudied relationship between spelling reforms and strategic constructions of historical time.
This article establishes duration as a distinct normative temporal structure that influences life course transitions, expanding beyond the predominant focus on age norms in existing literature. Drawing on life story interviews with 55 individuals in Shenzhen, China, the study examines how duration norms - socially constructed expectations about how long particular life course stages should last - operate in the transitions from relationships to marriage and from marriage to childbearing. The findings show that duration norms exhibit three key components of social norms identified in classical theories: specific behavioural expectations, collective consensus, and sanctions for violations. Through detailed analysis of participants' narratives, the research reveals how duration functions as a malleable yet powerful normative framework that interacts with age and sequence norms to collectively structure family formation decisions. The qualitative approach captures the lived experience of duration norms, including how they are felt, interpreted, and negotiated in everyday decision-making processes during life transitions. By establishing duration as a critical dimension of temporal norms, this research advances our understanding of how time structures social life. These findings contribute to life course theory, the sociology of time, and empirical understandings of family formation processes in contemporary urban China, demonstrating how duration norms constitute a previously undertheorised yet significant aspect of temporal regulation.
In 1987, the UN report Our Common Future, also known as the Brundtland report, was published by a group led by its namesake Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian prime minister and chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The group had been tasked with solving an increasingly difficult and contradictory problem. As knowledge about anthropogenic impact on the global environment was mounting-James Hansen would testify to the U.S. congress about the reality of anthropogenic climate change the following year-these insights needed to be integrated into the trajectory of global development that had been pushed since the early postwar era by Western nations. At the heart of this process was the clash of different temporalities; the political, social, and human historical on the one hand and the temporalities of the Earth and its systems on the other hand. In this article, I ask how these clashing environmental and social temporalities were made commensurable with each other through the concept of sustainable development that engendered certain energy futures. Through which conceptual tools, quantitative measurements, predictive models, and projections were the planetary limits which supplied the framework for life on Earth made to appear possible to overcome with a certain form of economic development? The article starts with a broad outlook over the political ecology of sustainable development in the global policy context in the early years of implementation, and then moves into the empirical case of the Swedish forestry which became a key asset in the country's journey toward net zero emissions over the decades from the 1990s onwards.
Western law does not merely operate within time; it actively produces a singular, linear temporality that functions as an ontological infrastructure for erasure. This paper analyzes the chrononormative straitjacket, an Enlightenment-era inheritance from Cartesian-Newtonian mechanics, that embeds linear bias into the very architecture of legal reasoning, from statutes of limitation to causation tests. By prioritizing immediacy and definitive closure, modern jurisprudence inflicts temporal violence, rendering non-linear harms, such as the slow violence of climate collapse and intergenerational colonial trauma, legally invisible. Anchored in an inclusive synthesis of Indigenous relational temporalities, chronobiology, and complexity theory, this research advocates for a paradigm shift toward polytemporal legality. This transformative framework de-centers finality as a primary virtue, instead operationalizing a multi-scalar, epistemically humble jurisprudence capable of recognizing cyclical and ancestral temporalities essential for securing justice in the Anthropocene.
Politics, society, order, nature, natural rhythms and the climate are changing so fast they are like quicksilver, too slippery to grasp, splintering into new shapes the moment they seem containable. This is the end state of processes begun with colonial expansion, and the lies used to excuse colonial desecration of Peoples, lands, waters, of all that abided by natural cycles and limits. The article casts a lens over one 'insignificant' set of lies that forced northern seasonal temporalities upon the southern hemisphere's natural and cultural rhythms. It claims this was/is one aspect of the desire of settlers to dominate the natural in Aotearoa New Zealand and reflects on the ongoing legacies of suppression of the natural. Using the introduction of a 'new' winter celebration and public holiday - Matariki - as the catalyst for reviewing an upside-down celebratory calendar imposed by the settler colonial regime atop the seasonal patterns of the islands, it suggests it is little surprise that in a culture built on such obvious mismatched mistruths, it is not hard to convince either oneself or others that climate change is not real, that pollution is a small price to pay for industrialisation and so forth. I argue that these temporal lies are the forebears of the polycrisis and global turbulence.
The article develops a critical theory that links time extractivism and chronopolitics as interrelated structures of temporal appropriation under contemporary capitalism. It argues that the appropriation of time- traditionally tied to labor and now extended to life and attention-must be understood as both a material practice and an ideological administrative framework. Time extractivism captures the embodied and disciplinary dimensions of temporal exploitation, while chronopolitics refers to its systemic regulation. By articulating these concepts together, the article proposes a materialist and biopolitical lens to analyze how capitalist regimes extract and govern temporality through quantified, digital, and affective mechanisms.
From the Renaissance onward, German conservatism has defended space, a locus of stability, against the temporalization associated with Western European modernity. Attempts to map nations and occupations onto an atlas of changeless types were ultimately thwarted by social and technical change, and because it so easily spreads across classes and territories, fashion most readily registered this temporal erosion. But fashion simultaneously undermines and affirms timeless identities: the appeal of each individual trend - whether Georgian banyans, Impressionist kimonos or Victorian smoking fez - springs precisely from its origin beyond the reach of fashion and of modern temporality. The Romantic imaginings of German nationalists recognized fashion's paradoxical dependence on timeless identities, and sought to redirect this modern longing for the exotic timeless, towards an eternal German essence projected onto a changeless but spatially differentiated vernacular.
This essay investigates the peculiarities of contemporary temporal experiences under capitalism by analysing its relationship to the capitalist 'form' adopted by social reproduction. It argues that the extent and modalities in which capital mediates the field of social reproduction is responsible for the widespread time-related concerns and anxieties relative to social acceleration and time scarcity. The abstract time of the clock provides crucial conditions of possibility for both the relations of direct domination in the workplace between capitalists and workers, on the one hand, and markets' impersonal domination over society at large, on the other. However, it is argued that it is not abstract time, but capital, that stands at the root of contemporary temporal concerns. From a value-form reading of social reproduction, it is argued that capital's domination over social reproduction is comprehensive, albeit internally differentiated: on the one hand, capital dominates the practices it subsumes by forcing them to comply with dynamic standards of productivity if they are to be socially recognized as having contributed to society's ongoing reproduction. On the other hand, capital dominates the myriad practices it does not subsume by moulding their terms of occurrence to better serve capital's own context-specific reproductive needs. This approach is contrasted with the social acceleration and total subsumption theses, respectively.
In the Honduran region of Santa Barbara, since 1974, the villages of Pinito and Ladrilleras have appeared in public documents as officially flooded by the building of a dam called El Pino. El Pino Dam's construction project has embodied aspirations, hopes, and fears as, over the decades, it has been reanimated and later abandoned by multiple administrations. While not a single bag of cement has been laid on the ground, the project's approval has considerably impacted an array of actors, such as professionals involved in El Pino Dam's construction, public workers, and the inhabitants of areas programmed for flooding. In this article, I examine the heterochronic relations that emerge in the makings and unmakings of a cement-less dam and its surrounding area and how they configure a specific temporal configuration termed infrastructural temporal frictions. The heterochronic aspects of El Pino Dam's project are first analysed through a contextualisation of damming within more extensive Honduran histories. Afterwards, I explore the relationships between different temporalities related to the project by turning an ethnographic lens towards my participation in fieldwork conducted within Pinito and Ladrilleras as part of the most recent reanimation of El Pino Dam's construction scheme. Finally, issues of temporal agency take a central position in the analysis of two future-oriented ventures undertaken in Pinito and Ladrilleras.
Recent increases in institutional childcare utilization among Korean mothers, particularly stay-at-home mothers, have transformed daily scheduling patterns. Analysis of Korean Time Use Survey data from 2009, 2014, and 2019 (N = 2517) examined how mothers with children aged 5 and younger organize their childcare and non-childcare activities during weekdays, tracked changes in these patterns, and investigated their relationship with subjective well-being. Through sequence and cluster analysis with dynamic Hamming distance, multinomial logistic regression, and path analysis, distinct scheduling clusters and their prevalence over time were identified. Results show that recent waves of stay-at-home mothers increasingly adopted scheduling patterns characterized by more uninterrupted time for housework, leisure, and personal care activities, which positively influenced their well-being through reduced time pressure. However, employed mothers showed no significant changes in their scheduling patterns during this period, despite the evolving societal context of childcare arrangements. While this trend represents meaningful progress for stay-at-home mothers who are often vulnerable to the stress of full-time caregiving, the unchanged situation of employed mothers warrants continued attention to ensure equitable improvements in daily scheduling patterns across different maternal employment statuses.
Hybrid work has gained renewed attention post-COVID-19, prompting shifts in how we practice work and use digital technologies to both integrate and separate work and home in time and space. While often presented as flexible and individualized, hybrid work is deeply embedded in daily routines in the home and in collective rhythms. This paper examines how hybrid worker communities in Denmark reconfigure these rhythms and coordinate activities across the domains of work and home life. Drawing on social practice theory, Southerton's concepts of collective rhythms, and Mary Douglas' notion of moral coordination, we analyze in-depth interviews with hybrid workers from IT, knowledge and care sectors. We show how hybrid work contributes to a de-institutionalization of collective rhythms, loosening but not displacing the traditional 8-16 workday, which continues to function as a 'ground beat' in everyday life. This shift creates both new flexibility and new demands for coordination across domains, requiring workers to engage in ongoing temporal and moral negotiations. Digital tools play a central role in this coordination, offering new flexibility but also risks, including new forms of exposure. We argue that hybrid work does not dissolve the boundaries between work and home but reconfigures them through evolving practices of coordination. In doing so, it reshapes how time, visibility, and care are coordinated in post-pandemic everyday life.
This essay is a personal reflection as an artist living and engaging with a derelict plant nursery and the various opportunities for artistic practice that have arisen from this post-industrial site which is being returned to nature. It uses the context of the derelict greenhouse complex, past and present, to consider seasons as polyrhythmic and how the fluid seasonalities inside and outside have affected one another and in turn influenced the production of artwork over one and a half decades. The essay draws on inspiration from the writings of the architect Richard Neutra, philosopher Vil & eacute;m Flusser, the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the artist Robert Smithson, the anthropologist Viveiros de Castro and the theorist Nathalie Loveless. Through exploring seasonality, multinaturalism and biorealism, I try to show a way forward for artistic practice to bridge the gap that is developing between society and nature.
This article offers a critical framework to examine how temporal practices shape our understanding of algorithm dynamics, and how in turn the latter reinforce our experience of time. Drawing on Adam's timescape concept, it argues for specific temporal approaches and analytical perspectives in critical algorithm studies. In that guise, familiar notions such as "feedback loops" and "black boxes" are reframed through a temporal lens, seeking thus to produce critical reinterpretations of frequently overlooked sociotechnical connections. The first section of the article formalizes the concept of a timescape, laying the groundwork for a temporal perspective that can enrich our understanding of algorithmic assemblages. The second section surveys the field of critical algorithm studies, highlighting key theoretical frameworks and distinguishing between algorithms as technosocial systems and as code-based automated mechanisms. The third section proposes a research agenda that employs the timescape framework to reorganize and expand critical interpretations of algorithmic processes, while the last section attempts to ground that approach in concrete examples. Through this structure, the article seeks to broaden the scope of critical algorithm studies by foregrounding the temporal dimensions of algorithmic dynamics, offering a distinct analytical perspective on their sociotechnical implications.
In this article, we demonstrate how Indigenous temporalities have been taken and how they are being taken back. We explore three stories from each of the authors’ lived experience and/or research work. These stories include Ngāi Tahu in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Sámi in Sweden, and Inuit in Nunavik (Arctic Québec). The stories span empirical contexts of historical evidence, storytelling, and research practice; temporal problems of erasing historicities, temporal othering, and dominating efficiencies; and resistance strategies through Indigenous archives, artistic expression, and research sovereignty. We contribute to critical Indigenous studies by emphasising the dimension of time, not just as a cultural ontology, but also as a potential part of political practice towards self-determination. We also contribute to critical time studies by sharing Indigenous temporal practices that can broaden the discussion of how time can be used as a tool in political struggles.
