Broadly speaking, research on the problem of ‘community’ has focused on the task of analysing, challenging and transforming how particular qualities or attributes (be it race, gender, sexuality, place, interest, affinity, history, class etc.) are constructed as being ‘in common’. The interest of this project is to explore how time might be involved in the production of the ‘in common’ that defines who or what can be included in a community. Research from across the humanities and social sciences, highlights the role of temporality within social methods of inclusion and exclusion, understandings of legitimacy and agency, processes of social change, communal futures and pasts, the experiences of accelerating global networks, the ideal pacing of economic productivity, contradictions between human and ecological time-frames, and the production of social norms. However, despite the complicated and wide-ranging role of temporality in some of the most pressing questions about social mechanisms of connectivity and belonging, the research on ‘time’ and ‘community’ remains fragmented and underdeveloped.

To support the development of a more co-ordinated research approach to the interconnections between time and community, the Temporal Belongings project is hosting an interdisciplinary residential workshop, which will provide an opportunity for a broad range of researchers to explore how time is involved in the production, maintenance, complication, destruction and/or disavowal of connectivity within and between communities.

Our confirmed keynote speaker is Professor Carol Greenhouse.

Format of the workshop

The residential workshop will include around 40 participants and will take place over two days at the University of Manchester’s conference and hotel facility; Chancellors. In order to explore the breadth of approaches, and support new collaborations, the workshop will include a variety of session formats. Along with a small number of longer papers, there will be themed sessions of short 5 minute papers (or lightening talks) followed by discussions. There will also be an Open Space session on Day Two where themes emerging from the paper sessions can be explored in greater depth.

Suggested Themes

Participants are welcome to approach the theme in the way they think is most thought-provoking, although we have suggested possible topics below.

Given that the workshop forms part of the initial agenda setting for the Connected Communities research programme we also keen to respond to the five central themes which are envisioned as shaping the research programme and we would also particularly welcome contributions that respond to them. The five themes are: ·

• Community participation, self-reliance and resilience
• Community health and well-being
• Community regeneration and prosperity
• Sustainable community environments, places, spaces and institutions
• Community cultures, diversity and cohesion

Possible topics include:

• How changing experiences of time might be changing the nature of connectivity within and between communities.
• The temporality of varying accounts of ‘community’ including within continental philosophy, political philosophy, feminist theory, international relations theory, actor-network theory, anthropology, sociology, geography.
• Explorations of techniques of temporally isolating, distancing and/or misrecognising others.
• The role of time in legitimisation, universalisation and normalisation.
• Time as a tool of social co-ordination and/or as a method of managing social diversity.
• Time and communal agency/social change, including explorations of how different accounts of time might lead to different understandings of change, action, the future, or of the role of the past in the present.
• Queer temporalities and queer belonging
• Temporality of community in post-colonial and settler societies
• The temporality of ‘more-than-human’ communities
• Belonging in a time of climate change
• Role of temporality in the inclusion/exclusion of asylum seekers and immigrants from communities
• The implications the variety of nested and overlapping social times may have for social services, community activism, policy development and environmental work.
• Rethinking regeneration and prosperity in a time of resource depletion
• Exploring how time is involved in producing alternatives to notions of perpetual growth, such as steady state economics, free-economy movements, and voluntary simplicity movements
• Time and the City
• Temporality of technological change and its effects on connectivity and community
• Time, Community and Affective Belongings
• National identity and shared time/memory/history

Contact Michelle Bastian (michelle.bastian@manchester.ac.uk) CRESC, University of Manchester