400009 SE Thinking technoscientific developments through time: Seminar for PhD students in STS (2016W)

The aim of this seminar is to reflect on and articulate the ways in which thinking about time is relevant in and for their STS-related work. In general, STS-scholars often tend to take time for granted, to use it as one of the containers that are part of the contexts of or the explanations for what we study. Emphasising materiality often came at the price of giving less attention to hidden and latent temporalities. Yet time is an essential feature that not only enables us to structure and order our worlds but also to create and sustain the feeling of stability and belonging.
In many cases we straightforwardly use calendar time, clock time, time that runs linearly from past to present to future, to order our stories, descriptions and explanations. This idea of linear temporality is grounded in sociotechnical conditions such as early modern industrialization, the emergence of clock-time, and the processes of individualization. Linearity allows us to order events, to differentiate cause from effect, and to produce futures by extrapolating from pasts and presents.
The seminar is an invitation to think time in multiple and different ways, as flowing in a turbulent and chaotic manner, as percolating into every little element in the world around us, but also into how we create meaning and think about all this. From such a perspective time can be schematized by a kind of crumpling, a multiple, foldable diversity (Serres and Latour, 1995: 59). We will thus reflect on the nature of time(s) in the many different sites STS relates to, on the powerful ways in which ever changing temporalities structure contemporary societies, and on how time has become a central resource to be owned, managed, traded and controlled.
The seminar will elaborate on different ways how to understand and relate to technoscientific temporalities and link it to the diverse topics of the PhD thesis. The aim is to see and better grasp the temporal dimensions present in the own work and to reflect what understanding temporal dimensions add to the understanding of the issues at stake.