Call of short chapter for eBook: Time and Society in the Lounge

Editors: Emília Araújo (CECS/UM), Rosalina Costa (University of Évora), and Catarina Sales (CIES/UL/UBI)

COVID 19 pandemic is going to be a landmark in world-historical time. As a moment of interruption, suspension, and crisis, the current times are strongly disruptive and effervescent. They call up for cultural and political changes, as well as to new modes of experiencing, regulating and planning time, in all dimensions, and in every scale. While individuals, institutions, and communities are accelerating processes and struggling to face the spread of the virus, we tend to delay the time vanishment and control its human, social, environmental consequences; waiting has invaded social and individual lives. Running to anticipate consequences, society is in the lounge, waiting for the phase to pass, expecting the equilibrium to be restored. However, one knows that time flows, and reversibility will not be possible. Science and Social Sciences need to move forward to interrogate and understand the meanings of time collapse going on and anticipate its effects and consequences.

Time is one of the essential dimensions of life because is through time that beings, processes, and things get visible, experienced and felt. History and memory are time, as society is time too. Our daily life happens trough and with time. Time gets stuck, time advances, time can be stopped, transformed, converted, loved, or hated, given or refused, seen in advance, or managed in delay, subject to acceleration or wait, remembered or forgotten, stored, or lost, integrated or excluded. Time is simultaneously scarce and abundant. It is also transformed in many ways constantly. Language helps and blocks time from existing, feeling or being a matter of politics and of societal aspiration.

Many authors explained thoroughly the reasons why time is a sociological dimension, such as Hermínio Martins, Barbara Adam, Ramón Ramos, John Urry or David Harvey. Experiencing contexts of high uncertainty and risk, it becomes necessary to investigate and think governance and politics from the perspective of time, analyzing the best ways of reducing time conflicts, and its complementarities. Many daily routines and taken for granted modes of organizing and evaluating time are being changed, asking new sociological questions concerning the importance, the value and the meaning of time and its consequences.

For example, for some people, working time has been intensified, but for others, it has been reduced compulsively or changed. New forms of digitization have been imposed, such as the implementation of telework, e-health, e-school or e-learning. Additionally, many types of present-day accelerative processes are testing the capacity of individuals, institutions, and systems – such as politics, law, and media – to adjust and respond to social needs and creating other types of constraints upon the use and the experience of time.

In this sense, the challenge of this proposal is to publish a set of short texts (between 4000 and 5000 words), that can provide a comprehensive view about the different modes of understanding the relationship between time and society in contexts ever more characterized by suspension, risk, and uncertainty. The publication embraces the goal to contribute to better identify, understand, and anticipate societal changes, as well as modes of intervening in the social and political spheres that take time as a serious matter.

The editors propose to reunite contributions that can provide theoretically and empirically supported views about the pertinence of time for understanding this (ongoing) society in the lounge, its processes and entanglements, particularly in a moment of apparent disorder, enormous uncertainty, and risk.

Amongst other, editors welcome texts that discuss questions related to immediacy, sustainability, long-term political decision taken, economics, and the role of science (of the various sciences), ideology and technology in them are of enormous relevance.

Some suggestions of themes to be considered are:

• Time, theory and methods
• Time, science and public policy
• Time, crisis and gender
• Time, space and childhood
• Time, space, home and telework
• Time, power and new inequalities
• Time, solidarity and governance
• Time, prevision and anticipation
• Time and crisis communication
• Time metaphors and communication
• Time, memory and crises
• Time, learning and suspension
• Time, crisis and rupture
• Time, science and society
• Time, disease, postponement and waiting
• Time, digitization and collaboration
• Time, protest, phases and identities
• Time, mobilities and risk
• Time, politics, and media
• Time, age and systems
• Time, emotion, and death
• Time and (i)mmobilities

Texts (between 4000 and 5000 words) should be submitted according to APA norms, following the CECS’ Publication Manual. Please, consider the need of being original texts, not already published. The texts should be accompanied by a short biographical note of the authors.

Important dates:

20th May – submission of texts to emiliararaujo@gmail.com
30th May – contact with the author
15th June – Submission of final texts