This article analyzes the articulation of just futures within Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and Greenpeace International (GPI) to seek out the historicities of global environmental activism, from the early 1990s to present-day. This is done by examining not only how justice was conceptualized and temporalized but also how historical time, speed, and temporal change were articulated. It demonstrates how FoEI and GPI utilized futures to shed light on, and challenge, historical and contemporary injustices that they saw as sources of environmental degradation and/or social and economic inequalities. Hence, temporal transition has not only been understood to occur from the present to the future but also in the opposite direction. However, to speak of just futures involves a process in which one's present concept of justice is temporalized into a time in which it does not belong. Naming futures is therefore an anachronistic practice, traditionally understood to take on one of two forms: retrospective anachronism or prospective anachronism. Both forms have, however, been argued to domesticate the future. In contrast, I suggest a third form: critical anachronism. While critical anachronisms may look like the traditional forms, I argue that it is an intentional and reflexive use of time that stands in stark contrast to the unintentional error that is usually associated with anachronisms. Drawing on ideas from the domain of temporality studies, I argue that futures are made present. Moreover, inspired by Austin's speech act theory, I argue that the use of futures as critical anachronisms should be understood as implicit performative speech acts. Thinking of articulated futures as critical anachronisms means considering the context and intention of the speaker; critical anachronisms are not uttered to describe but to effect.
This article argues that the subjective experience of time is not an a priori category of consciousness but is constructed post-priori from the organism's engagement with discrete events. Drawing on computational work showing that a single on-center off-surround recurrent network can process both numerosity and temporal duration through winner-take-all dynamics, I extend a previously developed philosophical framework, in which events hold ontological priority over time, into social theory. The computational model is deployed in two delimited roles: as an existence proof that duration experience can be generated without a dedicated timing mechanism, and as the governing account of one scale among three. I set out a stratified account in which perceptual, interval, and mnemonic regimes of temporal construction are governed by different mechanisms but by a common independent variable, the distribution of prediction violations across an agent's event stream, which I call habituation structure. If temporal experience emerges from event-magnitude processing shaped by habituation, then the social organization of events is not merely something that occurs in time but is constitutive of temporal experience itself. I introduce temporal capital to name the unequal distribution of event-richness, novelty, and agentic control over event sequencing across social positions. Against the resource-and-capacity reading that the term invites, I develop temporal capital as relational: agentic sequencing is not a stock an individual holds but a position in a distribution of rights to impose events on others’ streams. I situate this against the literature on discretionary time and temporal autonomy, which establishes the distributive claim on independent grounds, specify a measurement strategy for each dimension using existing instruments, identify the designs under which the causal claims could be tested, and state what the account cannot explain, notably the misrecognition through which an imposed temporal order comes to be experienced as one's own.
Adolescence represents a period of significant changes across multiple domains. In Chile, approximately 500,000 adolescents have Special Educational Needs (SEN) and face compounded challenges in emotional regulation. Integrating time perspective flexibility with mindfulness practices offers a promising approach for supporting emotional intelligence development. This study explored the effects of an intervention combining time perspective and mindfulness on emotional regulation in adolescents from the School Integration Program in the Biobío region of Chile. A phenomenographic qualitative design with reflexive thematic analysis was employed. Participants included six adolescents with SEN, five parents, and 18 education professionals from three schools. Data were collected through six individual episodic interviews and five discussion groups. Findings indicate positive evaluation of the intervention, including the acquisition of breathing techniques, improved emotional recognition, and enhanced emotion management. Students displayed negative past and fatalistic present perspectives linked to regulatory difficulties, contrasting with optimistic future perspectives. Teachers observed behavioral improvements in students. Overall, the integration of flexible time perspective and mindfulness appears effective for adolescents with SEN, and future interventions should emphasize parental involvement and curriculum integration.
In a research project on risks of injection drug use, it became evident how substances, along with social conditions, organize experiences of time and life for people who use drugs. Drawing on interviews with 32 participants, we examine how temporal inequality—unequal access to and control over time—emerges through temporal barriers, structural constraints operating through temporal autonomy restrictions and temporal uncertainty. We approach time as a social and political resource from perspectives on (de)valued, (un)recognized, and (in)visibilized forms of work. The results show that access to societal infrastructures and resources shapes participants’ temporal horizons and future orientation, and that relationships with the future are sometimes completely closed off. This forces participants to navigate in the present, often requiring constant temporal work to organize everyday life with daily drug use, including urgent microplanning and waiting for basic needs and institutional decisions. This work, while constant, remains hidden as the activities associated with it are regarded as criminal and reprehensible, further impacting social status and time experiences. Structural exclusions from life within the confines of legality, combined with highly conditional treatment and welfare systems, weaken participants’ autonomy and control over time, and produce waiting as a mode of life. For example, people wait for the legal system to clear their criminal records and for treatment services to trust them with methadone. Institutional timetables thus manifest a temporal barrier, retracting time autonomy and reproducing those who wait as unproductive and perpetually potential rulebreakers. The concept of reprehensible work emerges as central, capturing how everyday activities in a life with drug use become stigmatized. We conclude that shifting focus from substances to their regulation is crucial for addressing temporal barriers and reducing temporal inequalities.
The article examines how the temporal space of a crisis is constructed, synchronized and contested within crisis governance. Drawing on conceptual history and recent scholarship on crisis temporalities, we introduce the concept of ‘institutional synchronization’ to capture the active, precarious work of aligning diverse governance actors into a shared temporal framework. Through an in-depth case study of the Finnish COVID-19 response, utilizing situational reports, government policies and parliamentary debates, we map how this synchronization was achieved across expert, governmental and parliamentary domains. Our analysis identifies two core mechanisms of temporal alignment: ‘situational temporal framing’ (operationalized via the metaphor of epidemic waves) and ‘data-driven presentism’, which anchored decision-making in a continuously updated ‘now’. While these mechanisms effectively forged a synchronized present at the outset of the pandemic, they inherently marginalized long-term societal timescapes. As the crisis prolonged and its scope widened beyond a narrow epidemiological emergency, this temporal friction resulted in political contestation and the ultimate fracturing of the synchronized order. By demonstrating that crisis synchronization is not an automatic societal alignment but a linguistically mediated and highly fragile institutional effort, this article contributes to our understanding of chronopolitics and the limits of crisis governance in an era of polycrisis.
