About the project
Lifetimes: A Natural History of the Present proceeds from one main research question: How are scales of time and scales of life entangled in human societies? How and under what circumstances do they come together to form new temporal arrangements and how do these arrangements change?
This project seeks to investigate these entanglements and temporal arrangements through recent global history, in the four lifetimes orders of bio-, geo-, cosmo-, and quantum-.
Objectives
This project sets out to develop an alternative view of the temporal order of global society, in which the linear, homogenous times of modernization is challenged by a multiplicity of rhythms, speeds, and durations, in various historical and geographical contexts, emerging from lives unfolding on and in the planet, as well as in the universe. Humans as political actors and humans as geological agents exist within different scales of time as well as different scales of life.
But in the everyday these scales become entangled and give rise to singular temporal arrangements, or regimes, which govern decisions and actions.
The primary objective of this project is to show how “lifetimes” form through the entanglement and synchronization of different time scales and life scales, and how they change our experiences, our practices and our orders of knowledge.
More specifically, we want to investigate how biological, geological, and cosmological time scales combine with social and political concepts to form temporal arrangements governing human life, and how these arrangements converge and come in conflict with each other.
The project places itself at the forefront of an on-going reorientation of humanities and social sciences, moving beyond the long-standing emphasis on language and representation as well as the protracted “spatial turn” to a re-examintation of time and temporality – “a new metaphysics of time”, as the editor, Ethan Kleinberg, called it, in his introduction to the first virtual issue of History and Theory (2012).
Rather than embracing this metaphysics, however, this project sets out to explore the various empirical and historical manifestations, as well as the materialities, of temporal experience, assembled to chronologies or temporal arrangements.
These temporal arrangements are identified and described according to their emergence, transformations and effects in the fields of health and medicine, engineering and resource management, and politics and government.
Furthermore, we investigate the history of organizing and classifying scales of time and scales of life, turning them into representations and narratives, in the genres and discourses of natural history, heritage, and future histories, in which temporal arrangements are represented as belonging to the present, the past, and the future, respectively.
Finally, we look at the new concepts of time and time scales in the field indicated by the short-hand “the quantum” emerging from advances in quantum theory.
Read more at our project website
Financing
The Research Council of Norway and University of Oslo.
Duration
2018-2023.
Sub-projects
The Project is divided into seven subprojects.
WP1: Natural History after Natural History
This first WP deals primarily with the historical and theoretical framework, in other words, with the preconditions for writing a natural history of the present.
WP2: Health and Medicine
WP2 studies the emergence and deployment of temporal arrangements in the field of health and medicine. The first part of WP2 will explore the transformations of bacteria and bacterial ecologies during the 20th century as temporal and spatial events, that is, as biological, historical and cultural processes. The second part of WP2 will follow the emergence of gerontology as a practice designed to synchronize lifetimes and historical times, or more precisely, microbiotic times with the modern dream of progress. The third part of WP2 will study the medial context for microbe pandemics.
WP3: Engineering and Resource Management
The first part of WP3 explores how the mining industry since the 18th century has been a field of knowledge and practice, where different time scales have become entangled and synchronized. The location for the study will be the Mining Seminar at Kongsberg, Norway, one of the first Mining Seminars in Europe. The second part of WP3 will focus on land reclamation practices, for instance in the Netherlands, asking how the entanglement of time scales and the emergence of new temporal arrangements changes if the engineering practices in question are not involved in removing land masses to discover metals and minerals, but, on the contrary, in amassing them in order to produce new land.
WP4: Politics and Government
In WP4, we study how entanglements between different time scales give rise to temporal arrangements specific to the field of poltics and government. The first part of WP4 focuses on how the fate of the bodies of state leaders, both their biological frailty and their assumed connectedness with cosmological time scales, in terms of signs from the heavens, has severe consequences for the perceived health of the state. In the second part we scale up to the level of dynasties, which have little or no role in the political thinking of modernity, but nevertheless continue to impose a, less-future-oriented, more circular temporal arrangement, onto the dream of modernization and progress.
WP5: Heritage
The first part of WP5 explores how heritage governance and practices negotiate time as climate change forces a radical temporal shift. In particular we are interested in how industrial heritage contributes to negotiations about geological time and resources, as well as how natural heritage sites are produced as wilderness and “nature”. The second part studies cultural and natural heritage in Syria, especially the inscriptions of heritage as discourse in the “aftermath” of crisis evinced by the ongoing destruction.
WP6: Future History
The first part of WP6 will investigate the genre of climate fiction but which has had a fertile future historical presence since the 19th century, surviving through conceptual iterations such as disaster fiction, and eco-fiction. The project will investigate how climate change as a discourse with its inherent futuristic bent constructs the link between human/bio futures and planetary/geo futures, and how these are given shape in cultural representations of possible futures. The second part will explore how the human non-human/alien contact and interaction reframes different kinds of time-scales but also itself moves within time, from being a metaphor for European colonial contact with other cultures in the past to the other of technology and the more sophisticated understandings of cohabitation with other lifeforms in the present day.
WP7: Quantum
The first part of WP7 will deal with the possibilities offered by quantum theory within the discipline of history, both for the practice of history and the writing of it. It will explore the larger history of multiple possible worlds and their implications for a new model of time, working through its Enlightenment models in Gottfried Leibniz’s theory of time to its present constitutions through the different “Arrow of time” models, the work of Gilles Deleuze, up to the unified model of “constructor theory.” The second part deals with another field where quantum has found a home: the field of allohistories and “quantum-fiction” within science fiction.
Events
Lifetimes Friday seminar
Lifetimes Friday seminar with Mary Elston
Welcome to this semester's fifth Friday seminar, where Dr. Mary Elston will will present a part of her book manuscript that deals with the complex temporalities of the concept of tradition (ar. turath) as used in the oldest Arab university, al-Azhar. The event is open for all.
Time and place: Dec. 1, 2023 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, PAM489 and Zoom
Turāthī Time: The Concept of Tradition at Egypt’s Al-Azhar
The Arabic concept turāth, often rendered “heritage,” “tradition,” or “legacy,” is a central concept for contemporary Muslim religious scholars associated with al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Sunni learning located in Cairo. These scholars describe themselves as taking a turāthī approach to knowledge and education, which they argue is the antidote to many of contemporary society’s ills, including secularism and religious extremism. Yet despite its centrality to their epistemological and educational paradigms, these scholars express ambivalence about turāth as a concept, evident in their spoken and written statements. Based on a section of my book manuscript, Above Time: Reviving Tradition in Modern Egypt, this presentation situates these scholars' ambivalence about turāth within the complex temporality of the concept as it is articulated and practiced at al-Azhar.
Mary Elston is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo. Her scholarship combines historical, textual, and ethnographic methods to explore Islamic education, religion and politics, and conceptual change in the modern Arab world. Her book manuscript, Above Time: Reviving Tradition in the Modern Muslim World, analyzes a traditionalist education movement at al-Azhar, the preeminent institution of Sunni Islamic learning situated in Cairo. She received her PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University in 2020, and her dissertation won the Alwaleed Bin Talal prize for best dissertation in Islamic studies.
This seminar series is organized by the Lifetimes project.
Organizer
Ingrid Eskild
Lifetimes Friday seminar with Alessandro Rippa
Welcome to this semester's fourth Lifetimes Friday seminar where we are joined by Alessandro Rippa, associate professor from the Department of Social Anthropology at UiO. The event is open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 17, 2023 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, PAM489, PA Munchs hus
Amber times: Reflections on entanglements and (missed) encounters from the Chiapas mines
The ERC-funded project "Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene (AMBER)" considers the multiple and entangled worlds of amber through ethnographic research in different sites of extraction, trade, and science.
For this Friday seminar, we have invited Associate Professor Alessandro Rippa to share some preliminary reflections regarding time and temporality from his recent fieldwork in amber mines in Mexico.
You can read more about the AMBER project on this website: https://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/AMBER/index.html
Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology. His research concerns infrastructure, global circulations, and the environment. He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project "Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene" (2023-2028).
This seminar series is organized by the Lifetimes project.
Organizer
Ingrid Eskild
Lifetimes Friday seminar with Mustafa Akay - Multiple Periodisation in a Seventeenth Century Ottoman World-Chronological Work
Welcome to the third Friday seminar this semester where we are joined by IKOS doctoral fellow Mustafa Akay. The event is open to all.
Time and place: Nov. 3, 2023 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, PAM489 and on Zoom
Multiple Periodisation in a Seventeenth Century Ottoman World-Chronological Work: Katip Çelebi's Taḳvīmü't-Tevārīḫ
This work-in-progress focuses on the universal chronology Takvimü't-tevarih, written in 1648 by the Ottoman polymath Katib Çelebi (b.1657). The presentation will focus on two general aspects of the work: 1. the ways in which the work periodises and presents history, and 2. a new public practice of historiography that is visible in the work's repeated reproductions by the copyists and readers.
Both points aim to provide a framework for the production and use of historical knowledge, which became increasingly publicised and diversified in the period in question, and its relation to the formation of the political sphere.
Mustafa Akay is a PhD research fellow at IKOS, University of Oslo, working on changing narratives and perceptions of world history in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire of 1650-1900. In 2013, he graduated in Sociology and History departments from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and started master's programme in History in the same year. He received master's degree with a thesis on world history and sacred history narratives in the Ottoman Empire.
Organizer
Ingrid Eskild
Alisa Shablovskaia - The 'Circle of Justice' in the Age of Representative Democracy: The Persian Discourse on Shura
Postdoctor at IKOS, Alisa Shablovskaia will present her project for the Lifetimes group. The event is open for all.
Time and place: Oct. 27, 2023 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM, PAM489
The 'Circle of Justice' in the Age of Representative Democracy: The Persian Discourse on Shura
The debate on the compatibility between the Islamic principle of consultation (shura, mashvara) and the modern western concept of democracy has been at the center of the polemic on “political Islam” for several decades.
The major contributors to this debate mainly studied the Islamic discourse on shura from the theological perspective thus focusing on the “religious vs. secular” binary. “Democracy” being defined as a modern and secular political model, such an approach has contributed to the temporalization of cultural difference and neglected the complexity of shura as a multi-layered concept.
This paper attempts to historicize the Persian discourse on shura by applying the methodology of the history of concepts as it was formulated by Reinhart Koselleck. It posits that, since the mid-Qajar period, shura emerged as an increasingly entangled concept which accommodated both religious and secular visions of political power.
While being embedded simultaneously in linear and cyclical temporalities, the concept of shura was systematically used to curb the sovereign’s power, enlarge the horizon of expectation and increase the agency of Iranians. However, the gradual association of shura with the western model of representative democracy and revolutionary change turned it into an extremely contested concept, impeding a dialogue between different political groups.
Lifetimes Conference
Time: 9. aug. 2023 – 11. aug. 2023
About the conference
Time is suddenly everywhere in the eyes of humanities scholars and social scientists: in the webs of life that have evolved to maintain life on this planet; in the everyday lives of cab drivers, scientists and calendar software developers; in the stories we turn to in order to understand the present; in histories of growth and expansion; in the timelines, plans, and deadlines defining fundamental stakes of politics.
There is growing interest in historiographies of time, ethnographies of time, media theories, social theories and aesthetics of time. But ultimately, why does it matter that time is multiple and ubiquitous?
The Lifetimes project’s concluding conference is dedicated to the issues that arise when we no longer live the same histories, endure the same experiences, follow the same beat, or even conceptualize the times we live in with the same vocabulary, the same timekeeping technologies, or from within the same academic disciplines.
Keynote Speakers
Laura Watts is an ethnographer of futures and Professor in Energy & Society at University of Edinburgh, whose research explores the effect of 'edge' landscapes on how the future is imagined and made, as well as methods for writing futures otherwise. As a Science & Technology Studies (STS) scholar she has collaborated on energy futures for the past decade in the Orkney islands, Scotland. Her latest book Energy at the End of the World: an Orkney Islands Saga (MIT Press) won the 4S Rachel Carson Prize, was Shortlisted for the Saltire Research Book of the Year, and Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. In 2017 she won the International Cultural Innovation Prize with the Reconstrained Design Group for a community-built energy storage device designed from scrap parts. More on her research at www.sand14.com.
Mark Rifkin. Mark Rifkin is a professor of Indigenous studies, queer studies, and U.S. literature at UNC Greensboro, primarily researching Native American literary and political writing and their encounters with colonial legal and administrative regimes. Rifkin has written a series of books elaborating concepts of indigeneity as a source of profoundly decolonizing challenges, including Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017).
In addition to the keynote, Rifkin will be joining Liisa-Rávná Finbog on a panel about settler colonial temporalities, Indigenous temporal sovereignty, and processes of “truth and reconciliation”. The panel follows the publication, in June, of the report of the commission investigating Norwegianisation policies and injustice against the Sámi and Kven/Norwegian Finnish peoples.
Special Guests
Michelle Bastian. Dr Bastian is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities in the College of Art at Edinburgh. She works across critical time studies and the environmental humanities with an interest in phenology (the scientific study of life cycle timing in plants and animals), timekeeping technologies, field philosophy methods and community responses to climate breakdown.
Liisa-Rávna Finbog. Dr. Finbog is an Indigenous scholar and duojár at Tampere University. A long-time practitioner of the Sámi craft and storytelling practice of duodji, her PhD in museology broke new grounds elaborating duodji as a Sámi system of knowledge. In addition to her scholarship and activism, Finbog is a curator and part of the team behind The Sámi Pavillion at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Program
Wednesday 9 August
Welcome by Helge Jordheim.
Panels
- Lifetimes Roundtable. Brita Brenna, Alp Eren Topal, Einar Wigen, Leonoor Borgesius, Stine Alling Jacobsen, Helge Jordheim
- Seasonality. Scott Bremer, Laura op de Beke, Wanxian Zhang. hybrid
- Contesting Colonial Times. Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, Arash Dehghani, Srideep Mukherjee. hybrid
- Biology, Wildness and Civilization. Henrik Sinding-Larsen, Lisette Jong, Ciro Miguel
- Generating Sustainable Futures. Salvatore Paolo De Rosa, Gregers Andersen, Heather McKnight. hybrid
- Care Temporalities. Ada Arendt, Giulia Carabelli & Dawn Lyon, Halvor Hanisch, Janike Kampevold Larsen. hybrid
- Scientific Temporalities Past and Present (1). Julia Nordblad, Marit Ruge Bjærke, Staffan Bergwik
- Disaster Time. Inna Sukhenko, Nabanita Samanta, Yunjeong Joo, Jill Stauffer. hybrid
- Digesting Times, a workshop hosted by Linda Lapina and Kristine Samson
- Time and Performance. Anne Klara Bom, Janne-Camilla Lyster, Sarah Bro Trasmundi. hybrid
- Scientific Temporalities Past and Present (2). Emma Hagström Molin, Erik Isberg, Kristin Asdal
Keynote by Mark Rifkin: Temporality, Coloniality, Indigeneity.
Thursday 10 August
Keynote by Laura Watts: MoonFlyer: A solarpunk choose your own energy future adventure.
Panels
- Living Geological Time. Sophia Roosth, Leander Diener, Lachlan Summers
- Blursdays, Busyness, Boredom. Christian Parreno, Clare Holdsworth, Lauren Erdreich, Rachel Loewen Walker
- Strange Attunements. Hugo Reinert, Małgorzata Zofia Kowalska, Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Laura McLauchlan. hybrid
- Time in Natural Histories. Ingar Stene, Roos Hopman, Erik Ljungberg, Elisa Storelli, Christina Nadeau
- Temporalities of Urban Natures: Learning to Live With More-than-human time (1). Mathilda Rosengren, Elena Ferrari, Henriette Steiner, Jan van Duppen. hybrid
- Epidemic Temporalities. Hanne Amanda Trangerud, Tony Joakim Ananiassen Sandset, Ahmed Ragab. hybrid
- Speculative Worlds, a writing workshop hosted by Laura Watts
- Whale Extinction. Espen Ytreberg, Sadie Hale, Sonja Åman, Kristin Asdal. hybrid
- Temporalities of Urban Natures: Learning to Live With More-than-human time (2). Johanna Just, Chero Eliassi, Linda Lapina. hybrid
- Historiographies of Time. Hilbrand Wouters, Jacob Tom, Nitzan Lebovic, Mauro J. Caraccioli
Keynote panel with Liisa-Rávná Finbog and Mark Rifkin: Indigenous Temporal Sovereignty and the Truth and Reconciliation Process in Norway.
Friday 11 August
Time and Society editors' talk with Helge Jordheim and Michelle Bastian. Zoom link here.
My Body is a Clock: visualising Internal Temporalities. Artist talk by Isabella Martin
Panels
- Temporal Landscapes. Hannah Kristine Lunde, Robert Hume, Tone Huse, Zeynep Irem San & Sevgi Türkkan. hybrid
- Life Cycles and Death Cycles. Ana Maria Delgado, Camelia Dewan, Elisabeth Schober, Johanna Markkula, L. Sasha Gora. hybrid
- Medieval Temporalities. Eivor A. Oftestad, Kristin B. Aavitsland, Line Cecilie Engh
- Philosophies of Time. Johanna Sjöstedt, Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Sabiha Huq. hybrid
- Green Transitions. Hedda Susanne Molland, Stine Engen, Mads Ejsing, Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen
- Toing and Froing (Time and Migrations). Lu Chen, Alejandro Miranda-Nieto, Ben Grafstrom, Derek Basler
- In-between Time. Henriette Rørdal, Katharina Wuropulos, Tatiana Fogelman, Aleksandra Bartoszko. hybrid
- Presence and Rhythms. Lise Amy Hansen and Janne-Camilla Lyster, Rupert Griffiths, Astrid Schrader, Scott Thrift
- Concluding remarks by Michelle Bastian.
- Uchronia, a workshop about embodied rhythm hosted by Helga Schmid