This project utilises an interdisciplinary approach to explore changing concepts of community in the context of anthropogenic climate change, resource depletion and mass extinctions. It approaches the problem of community through the analytical lens of temporality, to suggest that social concepts of time play an important role in practices of inclusion and exclusion, in understandings of agency, and in communal accounts of the possibilities of social change. Informed by theoretical accounts of the political nature of time, drawn from a variety of disciplines, the project thus seeks to draw out the often implicit assumptions about time that guide contemporary responses to the multiple crises that characterise the anthropocene.

A number of case studies are planned as part of the project, two of which are currently underway.

1. Transitioning into the Future

The focus of the first case study is a community led attempt to respond to climate change and peak oil: Transition Liverpool. As a member of the larger Transition Towns movement, Transition Liverpool seeks to build the resilience of local communities by actively preparing for a post-carbon era. In doing so, the movement explicitly challenges globalised conceptions of space (in its focus on the local), while also explicitly attempting to reshape conceptions of time in its focus both on creating new visions of the future (Transition Tales, Energy Descent Action Plans), and by rejecting simplistic notions of progress by looking to the past for inspiration. The project will take the form of an action research/participatory study, based on my own current involvement with Transition Liverpool. I will seek to develop an account of the particular concepts of time that either help and hinder the group’s aim to build an inclusive, sustainable urban environment.

2. Condensed Clocks of Contestable Worlds

The second case study draws on Haraway’s notion of figurations as ‘condensed maps of contestable worlds’ to explore how ‘telling the time’ might be figured in radical new ways within the Anthropocene. Based on collaborative work with members of the Ecological Humanities group based in Australia, the project draws on work on multi-species communities and the relational nature of space and time to propose new modes of time-keeping in an age of climate change and mass extinctions. Focused on the critically endangered leatherback turtle, I explore the way this species, which is sometimes described as a living fossil, represents both the slow movement of time and the rapid shifts of climate change. I ask; if telling time by the clock hides the rapidity of climate change, how might telling time by our inter-relationality with leather back turtles enable us to develop a clearer picture of the multiple and conflicting temporal processes that characterise the anthropocene, and thus perhaps enable us to tell the time more accurately? Thus, I’m particularly interested in shifting away from understanding time as a relentless force outside ourselves, towards an account of time as a tool for managing the intertwined relationality of everyday life. So instead of asking what is time?, I’m interested in asking what kinds of relationality do we enact when we tell the time.