Temporalities and Power. Oppression | Resistance | Justice

Time can be fast and slow or stand still. Time can be a resource and some people have more time than others. Some “others” of society are forced to exist outside of time or are fixed to exist only in the past and are erased from the future. Having time and being in time are always related to issues of power. The aim of our conference Temporalities and Power is to build on and to critically expand notions of time and power relations while at the same time bringing together different perspectives and fields of study. We invite papers on the aesthetics, narrativisations, figurations, visualisations, rhetorics, discourses or practices of temporal oppression, resistance and justice covering an expansive range of geographies and historical periods and emerging from a wide field of the humanities: e.g. literary and cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, history, book studies and more, embracing a diverse selection of areas of study, such as: postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, gender & queer studies, disability studies, environmental humanities, and museum studies. Equally, we are interested in exploring a broad variety of genres and form[L(1] , e.g. (speculative) fiction, travel writing, poetry, (performance) art, museum exhibits, film & tv series, historical documents or immaterial practices. 

Our Research Training Group will host the international conference "Temporalities and Power: Oppression, Resistance, Justice" from 19th –21st November, 2025. The conference, organized by Theresa Gutmann, Johann Haberlah, Marie Kallenberg, Sophie Modert, Leandra Ossege, and Peri Sipahi, will explore the relationship between temporality, the present, and power. In addition to academic lectures and discussions, the conference will feature an author reading as an opening event that reflects on and deepens this relationship.

Further information on the event can be found in the Call for Papers. Please send abstracts and a short bio note to temporalities@uni-bonn.de by 20th April, 2025.