Abstract
2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of Time & Society. In that first issue, Barbara Adam, its founding editor, editorialised that the motivation behind the journal was to create a platform that would contribute to the dissolution of the constraining disciplinary boundaries in contemporary thought realms. The solvent for this intellectual process was time. Adam wrote a quite remarkable tour de horizon of the challenge; remarkable in its confidence and scope regarding what the temporal perspective could achieve. She urges us to free our minds from the habits of the national and provincial and to think globally by means of the temporal (Adam, 1992). Adam’s scintillating vision was a challenge to her contemporaries and a challenge also to the future and how it would reveal itself to our understanding.
The thirty years that have passed contained within them changes that can, without exaggeration, be said to be world-changing and world-historical. There was then, still, an entity called the U.S.S.R. and a China that was only just beginning to open up (partially) to the wider world. Countries, institutions and individuals were only just beginning to connect to the Internet through a thing called a web browser. Newspapers were joking about global warming being the ‘hot issue’ of the 1990s, and the sixth mass extinction crisis was only beginning to appear in dominant consciousness in the ‘save the rainforest’ movement. At the same time, 1992 was shaped by many issues continuing to make themselves felt today, such as the LA riots in response to police violence and the lack of accountability; nuclear capability negotiations; and reproductive rights marches and bills.
What has also changed is that the study of time has become more important in our understanding of the 'fundamental uncertainty' of society, and yet knowledge production is still often organised such that time studies itself, as Adam observed, has an uncertainty about where it might belong. With all this (and much more) in mind, we invited a range of prominent and emerging time studies scholars and activists to contribute to a special section on ‘Time Today’ for this anniversary issue. We asked for their reflections on the state of time studies today: where it has been, where it has been missing, where the challenges lie, and where the opportunities for new knowledge and understanding beckon. What follows are eleven interventions which call attention to the importance of temporal interventions for research on justice, globalisation, development, inequalities and more. We are urged to make time for transdisciplinarity and to enjoy the connective possibilities of the “time and…” in our journal’s title. Contributions include a reflection from Barbara Adam who revisits her first editorial and outlines the challenges she sees as most pressing for the present. While our outgoing editor Robert Hassan looks back across the success of the journal too, with particular attention to how the journal has advanced knowledge on the connections between the digital and social acceleration.
Sadly this anniversary issue also marks the departure of Robert after an impressive – and much appreciated – eleven years of service to the journal and to the field. As a leading figure in research at the intersection between time, globalisation and digital networks across the 2000s, Robert has fostered work at the intersection of time and knowledge production. Identified particularly with his conception of ‘network time’ (Hassan, 2003), he presciently diagnosed the shift from an industrial clock-time to post-industrial societies shaped by the new speeds and affordances offered by global networks. His co-edited collection 24/7: Time and temporality in the network society (Hassan and Purser, 2007) set the agenda for debates about speed, acceleration and digital societies, as have his many monographs including Empires of Speed: Time and the acceleration of politics and society (2009, Brill), Media, politics and the network society (2004, McGraw Hill) and most recently The Condition of Digitality: A Post-Modern Marxism for the Practice of Digital Life (2020). We wish him all the best in his new endeavours, and thank him for being so open and generous to work with.
At the same time we welcome Helge Jordheim, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo who will join the team as our new co-editor-in-chief. He has a background in German Studies and has published widely on conceptual history, with a particular focus on 18th century European history. Helge has led a number of ground-breaking research projects on time including Synchronizing the World, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and currently Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present, running from 2018 until 2023. This work contributes to our understandings of plural temporalities, theories of synchronisation and the entanglement of life across the temporal scales of the biological, geological and cosmological. We look forward to supporting work across these themes and more, as we anticipate the next 30 years of the journal.