2012–2013 Seminar: Temporality

We are interested in exploring the relationship between the processes referred to by “globalization” and the production, experience, and representation of time. How is time understood and shaped in globalization, and how do the processes of globalization shape time?  What is the time of globalization? How has globalization affected the social organization or subjective experience of time,across the social spectrum and across the world? What temporal dimensions of globalization demand critical attention? How may time and temporality serve as useful optics for the study of globalization? What dimensions of globalization are illuminated when we focus on the analytics and politics of time rather than, or in addition to, space? Are conventional temporal categories or modes of reckoning with time  (or change over time) adequate for grasping contemporary social transformations associated with globalization (or the temporal dimensions of globalization)? Do we need new temporal categories, schemas, and frameworks to grasp the relationship between time and society in our contemporary moment? In what ways have specific temporal figures or modalities been employed by scholars, critics, artists, and activists to understand present developments and possible futures (e.g., apocalypse, utopia, futurity, anticipation, hope, rupture, revolution, catastrophe, historicity, afterlives, legacies, spectrality, haunting, untimeliness)? We are not only interested in how globalization may influence our understandingof the past, present, and future, but how it might change the very categories ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’  as well as the relations among them.