Teaching Temporalities in and for Movements: Some Notes from Practice

There are a great number of ways to think about temporality in movements. Many of these ways, developed within different theoretical traditions, have clear affinities with each other. At an abstract level, they speak to continuity, incremental change, and sudden change; the variegated spaces, including institutional spaces, of temporal dynamics; and the interweaving of these spaces and temporalities in complex conjunctures. Where temporal dynamics are treated, as they often are, as largely structural, or at least super-agentic, temporal patterns are seen as emergent from collective action and constraining of it. Where temporal dynamics are treated as agentic–as they are in some versions of path-dependency, for example–they emerge from individual agents’ evaluation of incentives to change paths. For students of movements, there is another set of interesting questions about temporality, namely, how movement actors themselves–and potentially, too, their opponents–understand time and temporality, in terms of how they think change occurs (i.e., suddenly, incrementally, endogenously, exogenously, etc.) both historically and in their own time, and whether and how this makes a difference in and to their activity.

This paper casts a critical eye on both explicit and implicit conceptions of temporalities of social change in materials I have had a hand in preparing for housing and environmental justice activists in New York City. These include timelines, participatory learning activities, and games, used in training activities. I attend specifically to their explicit and implicit conceptions of time, as they interact with temporal aspects of the activism itself, including the interplay between lived urgency (e.g., for unhoused people or those facing eviction) and bureaucratic delays, multi-year legislative campaigns, or the prospect of extreme weather events. In so doing, it distinguishes among several different temporal “domains” or levels of abstraction, which, while equally real, are difficult to commensurate in any given analysis.