Ceasing, suspending and stopping: Taking care with time

Abstract

London Marking an anniversary is a temporal act and Time & Society ’ s 30 th birthday constitutes the journal as a temporal entity; one that marks time, accumulates, folds and releases time, and makes time. If a journal is understood as a set of social relations, then its temporalisation reveals, as Michelle Bastian et al., have put it, that time both ‘ organizes ’ these social relations, but is also ‘ of the social ’ (Bastian et al., 2020, original emphases); the journal ’ s birthday is a manifestation of the ways in which time and the social co-produce one another. An anniversary, however, is a particular temporal form that has to do with repetition and return, a ‘ year-day ’ of variable length depending on how a year is socially and politically constituted, but encompassing the notion of coming back in order to begin again. Here I offer some brief thoughts on repetition and return, alongside the temporalities of crisis and urgency, as a way to think through questions of time studies today, especially the question of its own cosmic time, geological time, earth time, soil time, indigenous time, women ’ s time, queer time, crip time, grey time, zombie