Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies conference 2010
Venue: The Hebdomadar’s Room, St. Salvatore’s Quad
Date: March 29-31 2010
Conveners: Morten Nielsen and Nigel Rapport
This conference focuses on the analytical potentials of conjoining the notions of ’urban’ and ’time’ in a conceptual assemblage for exploring the predicaments, anxieties and challenges of social life in diverse cities throughout the world. The conference brings together papers from a group of well-established and rising scholars from different academic disciplines (anthropology, sociology and geography) which, taken as a whole, can be considered as a fresh invitation to a temporally orientated ethnography of urban life today.
If cities throughout the world are characterized by an intensified spatial agglomeration of persons and things, there is an imminent need to understand also the inherently temporal aspects of these processes. Hence, through ethnographic studies from cities as diverse as Kingston (Jamaica), Ulaanbaator (Mongolia) and Madrid (Spain), the contributors to this conference explore different times and temporalities of contemporary urban life.
Cities provide dense articulations of global and local forces in relation to which people seek to position themselves not only in space but also in time. Emerging social landscapes within urban domains are frequently accompanied by increasing individual and collective anxieties about the malleable connections which are being established between the present and its past(s) and future(s). Although urban spaces open towards uncharted terrains of hitherto inaccessible possibilities, they may thus come to condense also uncertainties about what futures to expect and how to arrive at desired temporal destinations without the anchorage of a relatively stable past. Conversely, when idealised urban futures exist only in the past, ordinary temporal flows are suspended or held in abeyance. The present may thus assert itself as a protracted moment of contingency which points everywhere at once.
Different sites and locations in the city may be charged with particular temporal rhythms and velocities which take on palpable form as persons and things are connected in makeshift formations. In this conference, the contributors turn their attention towards these spatiotemporal modalities of urban life. Through detailed ethnographic studies, they chart how different temporal topologies are implicated in the lives of urbanites while also providing careful discussions of the concepts and terms by which we explore these phenomena. By exploring the temporal facets of social life in diverse cities throughout the world, they critically engage with and rethink important ongoing debates on issues of belonging, social connectedness, developmental (and ideological) schemes and spatial cosmologies.