TIME & SOCIETY

"Time is not time is not time": A feminist ecological approach to clock time, process time, and care responsibilities
Doucet A
Over the past half century, time-use studies have become a leading method for researching unpaid care work, especially in the multidisciplinary field of gender divisions of household work and care and in feminist international studies on counting and accounting for women's unpaid work. Although attention to conceptual and methodological refinements in time-use methods is increasing, more focus on the challenges of conceptualizing and measuring care responsibilities, the limitations of measuring relational care practices with clock time, the existence of other kinds of time, and the epistemological and ontological moorings of time-use studies is needed. Two research programs inform this article: qualitative and longitudinal research with Canadian households in which parents were challenging norms, practices, and ideologies of male breadwinning and female caregiving; and the development of a feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemological approach to knowledge making. A case study from the first program and several pivotal ideas drawn from the second-about relational ontologies, multiple ontologies, and the ethico-political dimensions of knowledge making-support three key arguments advanced in this article. First, I argue for a deeper interrogation of methodological and epistemological matters in coding, classifying, and categorizing care tasks in time-use studies. Second, I maintain that care responsibilities exist as "process time"; they can be narrated, but they cannot be measured in fixed units of clock time. Third, I maintain that it is not only possible, but politically and conceptually important for researchers to look beyond clock time, to recognize the ontological multiplicity of time, including relational and non-linear time and to embrace and use different kinds of time. This article is part of a growing call to reimagine how we think about, conceptualize, measure, and make knowledges about time, time use, and care-time intra-actions.
Time use studies, time, temporality, and measuring care: Conceptual, methodological, and epistemological issues
Doucet A
The critical temporalities of serial migration and family social reproduction in Southeast Asia
Yeoh BSA, Lam T, Somaiah BC and Acedera KAF
The prevailing neoliberal labour migration regime in Asia is underpinned by principles of enforced transience: the overwhelming majority of migrants - particularly those seeking low-skilled, low-waged work - are admitted into host nation-states on the basis of short-term, time-bound contracts, with little or no possibility of family reunification or permanent settlement at the destination. As families go transnational, 'family times' become inextricably intertwined with the 'times of migration' (Cwerner, 2001). In this context, for many migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian source countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, parental migration as a strategy for migrating out of poverty or for socio-economic advancement requires the left-behind family to resiliently absorb the uncertainties of parental leaving and returning. Based on research on Indonesian and Filipino rural households (studied from 2008 through 2017) including paired life-story interviews with parental/non-parental adult carers and children, the article investigates the crucial links between the time construct of seriality in migration on the one hand, and the temporal structure of family based social reproduction on the other. It first focuses on how serial migration produces, and is produced by, spiraling needs and expanding aspirations, hence creating its own momentum for continuity. The paper then explores how competing temporal logics create difficult choices for migrants, leading to the recalibration of priorities within constrained resources. By drawing attention to the co-existence of and contradictions between multiple temporalities in the lives of migrants and their families, a critical temporalities framework yields new insights in understanding the social reproduction of families in a migratory context.
Time and the Anthropocene: Making more-than-human temporalities legible through environmental observations and creative methods
Griffiths R
The Anthropocene term invokes the multiple temporalities through which organisms, ecologies, and environments unfold - from the immediacy of the present moment to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Viewed from the perspective of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, these organisms, ecologies, and environments, including the planet's human occupants, may well benefit if we took a view of time that was more-than-human in scope and scale. This paper demonstrates how design, creative practice, and technology can be used to make legible human and more-than-human timescales through local, planetary, and celestial imaginaries that are congruent with the Anthropocene term. It first considers various anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic phenomena that are used for time keeping, both human and non-human. It then discusses the design and development of a timepiece that uses observations of environmental light to imaginatively situate daily life within various temporal scales, from embodied, diurnal, circalunar, and annual to the sedimentary timescales of the geological record. Through the timepiece, the paper argues that a hybrid form of timekeeping that brings together human time standards and environmental observation could help align the temporal imaginaries of urban societies with biological, ecological, and planetary processes, while highlighting the presence of potentially damaging anthropogenic processes, such as artificial light at night. Such hybrid forms of timekeeping may help foster meaningful relationships between people and the environment, facilitate day-to-day awareness of the presence and extent of disruptive anthropogenic processes in our environments and provide an imaginative framework for thinking about urban time and life in an Anthropocene context.
Beyond mothers' time in childcare: Worlds of care and connection in the early life course
Milkie MA and Wray D
Family scholars examining time spent on children's care focus heavily on mothers' allocations to a specific sphere of active caregiving activities But children's needs for care and supervision involve connection to others; and many others beyond mothers can and do provide care, especially as children grow. Using a "linked lives" approach that centers relationality, we show how time diaries can illuminate children's time spent in "socially connected" care. Using recent (2014-2019) time diary data from the American and the United Kingdom Time Use Surveys, we examine mothers', children's, and teenagers' days to assess two forms of connected care time. First, results show that in addition to childcare time as traditionally measured by time use studies, mothers spend considerable further time providing connected care through social and community time in which children are included, religious activities with their children present, and mealtime with children. Second, looking from the child's perspective also underscores time in the larger "village" of carers within which children and youth are embedded. Fully two-thirds of 8-14-year-olds' and three-quarters of 15-17-year-olds' waking time is with mothers-it is spent alone or in social connection to fathers, extended family, teachers, neighbors, and friends. A "linked lives" approach shifts attention to assessing care time in diverse activities with others and to measuring mothers' and children's time in social connections within the larger world. This analytic frame also moves away from maternal determinism to highlight the contours of children's care and social time occurring within the community at large, as well as the roles and responsibilities of those outside of the mother-child dyad across the child's early life course.
Who's cooking tonight? A time-use study of coupled adults in Toronto, Canada
Liu B, Widener MJ, Smith LG, Farber S, Gesink D, Minaker LM, Patterson Z, Larsen K and Gilliland J
Understanding how coupled adults arrange food-related labor in relation to their daily time allocation is of great importance because different arrangements may have implications for diet-related health and gender equity. Studies from the time-use perspective argue that daily activities such as work, caregiving, and non-food-related housework can potentially compete for time with foodwork. However, studies in this regard are mostly centered on individual-level analyses. They fail to consider cohabiting partners' time spent on foodwork and non-food-related activities, a factor that could be helpful in explaining how coupled partners decide to allocate time to food activities. Using 108 daily time-use logs from seventeen opposite-gender couples living in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how male and female partners' time spent on non-food-related activities impact the total amount of time spent on foodwork by coupled adults and the difference in time spent on foodwork between coupled women and men. Results show that both male and female partners took a higher portion of foodwork when their partner worked longer. When men worked for additional time, the couple-level duration of foodwork decreased. Without a significant impact on the gender difference in foodwork duration, women's increased caregiving duration was associated with a reduction of total time spent on foodwork by couples. An increase in caregiving and non-food-related chores by men was associated with an increased difference in duration of foodwork between women and men, which helped secure a constant total amount of foodwork at the couple level. These behavioral variations between men and women demonstrate the gender differences in one's responsiveness to the change of partners' non-food-related tasks. The associations found among non-food-related activities and foodwork are suggestive of a need to account for partners' time allocation when studying the time-use dynamics of foodwork and other daily activities.
"A matter of time": Evidence-making temporalities of vaccine development in the COVID-19 media landscape
Harrison M, Lancaster K and Rhodes T
This article investigates how evidence of the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines is enacted in news media via a focus on the temporality of vaccine development. We argue that time constitutes a crucial object of and mechanism for knowledge production in such media and investigate how time comes to matter in vaccine evidence-making communication practices. In science communication on vaccine development, the vaccine object (along with the practices through which it is produced) undergoes a material-discursive shift from an imagined "rushed" product to being many years in the making and uninhibited by unnecessarily lengthy processes. In both these enactments of vaccine development, time itself is constituted as evidence of vaccine efficacy and safety. This article traces how time (performed as both calendar time and as a series of relational events) is materialized as an affective and epistemic object of evidence within public science communication by analyzing the material-discursive techniques through which temporality is enacted within news media focused on the timeline of COVID-19 vaccine development. We contend that time (as evidence) is remade through these techniques as an ontopolitical concern within the COVID-19 vaccine assemblage. We furthermore argue that science communication itself is an important actor in the hinterland of public health practices with performative effects and vital evidence-making capacities.
Disrupting times in the wake of the pandemic: Dispositional time attitudes, time perception and temporal focus
Loose T, Wittmann M and Vásquez-Echeverría A
The COVID-19 pandemic has majorly disrupted many aspects of people's lives, provoking psychosocial distress among students. People's positive and negative attitudes towards the past, present and future were a dispositional pre-COVID-19 reality. Faced with a pandemic, people have reported disruptions in the speed of passing time. People can shift their attention more towards the past, present or future when major changes in society occur. These aspects of psychological time would be key to understanding the quality of psychosocial adjustment to the pandemic. We hypothesized that dispositional time attitudes impact psychosocial distress because they would trigger situational changes in our time perception and temporal focus.
The 'telegraphic schizophrenic manner': Psychosis and a (non)sense of time
Flexer MJ
This paper reads Vonnegut's and Piercy's as stories of deictic temporal crises. It critically examines the texts, exploring their representations of mental time travel (MTT), and places them into dialectic with health sciences research on autonoesis and episodic memory deficits in people with lived experience of mental health disorders, particularly psychosis or 'schizophrenia'. The paper uses this dialectic to interrogate how atypical MTT is diagnostically and clinically rendered as pathological, and indicative of psychosis in particular. Similarly, it mines these fictional representations for the insights they might provide in attempting to understand the phenomenological reality of temporal disruptions for people with lived experience of psychosis. The paper moves on to incorporate first-person accounts from people with lived experience, and uses these to refine a Deleuzean static synthesis of time constructed around the traumatic Event and the Dedekind 'cut'. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how the literary texts offer possible insights into the experience of people living with 'psychotic' temporal disruptions, and in particular how to re-invest their deictic relations to establish functioning fixity and stability of the self in time.
Introduction: The social life of time
Bastian M, Baraitser L, Flexer MJ, Hom AR and Salisbury L