Temporal Belongings Research Network

Despite time often being experienced as an objective and unchangeable force within which we live our lives, work across the social sciences and humanities argues that shared understandings of time intervene into social life, shaping social methods of inclusion and exclusion, understandings of how change happens and who can make change, as well as accounts of how the past and future relate to the present. This suggests that, for those interested in understanding the possibilities and dynamics of community, it is crucial to analyse and explore the role of time in social processes. The project will support better understandings of how one of the most taken for granted aspects of daily life comes to shape experiences and understandings of community in a variety of ways. It will also explore how we can engage critically with these understandings and whether and how we might want to develop other understandings of temporality in order to respond more adequately to the complexity of social life.