Social Movements and the Politics of Time In Turbulent Times

Our session invites contributions discussing how social movements’ practices, discourses, strategies have been creating relations to time and future in their processes of navigating turbulent times. In social movements’ praxis, politics of time vary largely in different dimensions of their political action: the temporalities of everyday mutual aid, institutional disputes, long-term or short-term campaigns. Time and the future are not only imagined or contested by movements but they are also regulated, delayed, or administered by different institutions and power structures. This includes bureaucratic temporalities such as waiting, deadlines, pending procedures, postponed decisions, or uncertain sanctions, moments of repression and crises. From a global perspective, multiple movements have faced turbulent times by defying linear modes of apprehension of time and future hegemonically built on a Western, European perspective, through for instance entangled or cyclical temporalities. With this perspective, we ask how social movements’ actions and visions are conditioned, constrained, activated, contested and contesting regimes of uncertainty, waiting, risks? What types of orientations towards the future result from their action: hope, anticipation, expectation, urgency? What tensions emerge in social movements among different possible, probable, desired, avoided futures? How does it vary from a global perspective? To what extent have turbulent times changed the politics of times of social movements in their rationalities, orientations and affections? We welcome contributions from scholars from multiple fields working on different social movements facing turbulent times and engaged in the politics of time and future in both their local and global dimensions.