Abstract
As a communicative function, the Editorial, be it in a newspaper, or magazine, or journal, is intended to perform at least two tasks. The first is a summarizing and contextualizing of the day’s main news, the magazine’s principal themes, or (in this case) the journal’s contents. The second is to act as a platform for opinion, where editors will write on broader issues that connect with the particular media’s principle concerns (in our case temporality). We adopt both approaches for this edition.
Usually we curate a theme around certain issues or approaches that serves to focus and to deepen the research on time, and make salient a problem or debate current within the academy. However, the present issue is a very fine example of what was once, in an earlier pre-digital era, called the mix-tape. The mix-tape can be a welcome respite enabling the focus to open to wide-angle and to scan the temporal horizon, so to speak. Our selection for this issue ranges through Chuk Moran’s theorising of the social practice of time, and Mulícek et al. consider the urban timespace, through an emphasis upon the necessary theoretical linkage between time and space. Carrasco and Domínguez explore the gender bias between measured and perceived time—the phenomenological time, that is, of unpaid housework. And in a fascinating essay, Chelcea theorises the structural time transformation in a privatized Romanian bank in the early 2000s. Somewhat relatedly, Jankiewicz presents a fascinating essay that looks at the work time perspective in Poland from before and after the pivotal year of 1989. And lastly, Spurling contemplates the managerial and audit cultures that have colonized the universities to argue that there are both winners and losers in the incessant neoliberal fragmentation of work schedules.
Editorial moves to opinion here in order to reflect upon, from the perspective of temporality, the immense crises of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world today. The almost medieval trek of humanity from the Africa, the Middle East and South Asia up through the Balkans toward Northern Europe that is taking place today, is distressing, but nonetheless a fraction of the estimated 51 million souls who are living in camps, or are in hiding, or are looking for a place to settle. To move, to flee, and to seek refuge is, perforce, to reconfigure one’s space—to be displaced. It is also, of course, to rearrange (or have rearranged for you) what Barbara Adam termed the timescape. What constitutes the temporal experience of individuals in ‘transit’? A time of waiting, of fear, frustration, of boredom and expectation are temporal experiences we can all experience in our lives. But for the refugee, the ‘normal’ temporal rules no longer apply. The rhythms of urban life are broken up and replaced by discontinuous and erratic rhythms of a kind that most of us are not forced to reconcile with. The industrial and social rhythms that regulate and accelerate the lives of most of us are often subjected to critique in these pages, as they should be. However, for the millions who suffer chronic time-disruption, it is a form of time, however dreary and oppressive it can be, that can also be a rhythm of security and predictability that refugees, scattered from Beirut to Bergen, might happily swap for their present predicament.