Explore the vast range of titles available.

Decisions regarding the end-of-life of minor patients are amongst the most difficult areas of decision-making in pediatric health care. In this field of medicine, such decisions inevitably occur early in human life, which makes one aware of the fact that any life—young or old—cannot escape its temporal nature. Belgium and the Netherlands have adopted domestic regulations, which conditionally permit euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide in minors who experience hopeless and unbearable suffering. One of these conditions states that the minor involved must be legally competent and able to express an authentic and lasting wish to die. This contribution is different from other legal texts on end-of-life decisions in modern health care. Foremost, it deals with the role time-bound components play in our views on the permissibility of such decisions with regard to minor patients. While other disciplines provide profound reflections on this issue, from a legal point of view this side has hardly been explored, let alone examined with regard to its relevance for the legal permissibility of end-of-life decisions in pediatrics. Therefore, the manuscript inquires whether there are legal lessons to be learned if we look more closely to temporality-related aspects of these end-of-life decisions, particularly in connection to a minor patient’s assumable ability to choose death over an agonizing existence.

Bringing together scholars from philosophy, bioethics, law, sociology, and anthropology, this topical collection explores how innovations in the field of biomedicine and the life sciences are challenging and transforming traditional understandings of human temporality and of the temporal duration, extension and structure of human life. The contributions aim to expand the theoretical debate by highlighting the significance of time and human temporality in different discourses and practical contexts, and developing concrete, empirically informed, and culturally sensitive perspectives. The collection is structured around three main foci: the beginning of life, the middle of life, and later life. This structure facilitates an in-depth examination of specific technological and biographical contexts and at the same time allows an overarching comparison of relevant similarities and differences between life phases and fields of application.

Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.

Este trabajo aborda la poesía de la colombiana Piedad Bonnett (Amalfi, 1951) desde las figuraciones de la impermanencia, como mediación semiótica hacia las estructuras profundas del universo lírico. Apoyándome en la distinción hecha por Christine Buci-Glucksmann (2006) entre un efímero melancólico y un efímero positivo, procuro poner de manifiesto el predominio de signos textuales que conforman una visión dolorosa de la impermanencia en la poesía de Bonnett, donde lo que está en juego es la meditación sobre la temporalidad de la existencia a partir de una alegorización de lo fugaz, por un lado, y cierta intuición corporalista del tiempo, por otro. Desemboco al final del análisis en los condicionamientos susceptibles de justificar semejante actitud ante lo transitorio.

The articles in this section are based on a Social Science History Association roundtable organized in 2008 in response to Donna R. Gabaccia's presidential call “It's about Time: Temporality and Interdisciplinary Research” (see Gabaccia 2008; see also Gabaccia 2010). Her emphasis on questions of periodization resonated with concerns with which we had grappled for a decade. The questions that the roundtable and these articles address initially emerged from our experiences as teachers of a course on world history with a temporal frame of a few centuries (1450 to the present). But the course that really forced us to confront the challenges of periodization is one we introduced in the fall of 2009 on “the family from 10,000 BCE to the present.” In trying to connect research from around the globe on the domestic group as a site of world history to narratives that begin with human origins, we were struck by the inappropriate presumptions embedded in most conventional periodizations. Our inherited vocabulary of terms to describe eras, ranging from “the Neolithic revolution” to “early modern,” implicitly place all regions of the globe on a yardstick measured against European temporalities and based on activities typically gendered male.

For historians, questions about what to call particular eras and how to conceptualize the temporal dynamics of change become particularly acute as we take on revisionist projects, such as writing and teaching feminist history, examining chronologically “deep” history, or placing history in a material as well as a social environment and in a global perspective. Temporal frameworks influence historical research even when it is located within a very limited time frame; temporalities and periodizations operate more explicitly in the teaching of survey courses. The particular periodization problems we focus on here emerged from teaching premodern world history with a focus on family and household dynamics. In trying to connect research on the domestic group as a site of world history with a historical narrative that begins with the emergence of human society and draws on evidence from around the globe, we were struck again and again by the problematic perspectives embedded in conventional periodizations. New directions in archaeological scholarship offer global historians insights and approaches with which to inform their temporal frameworks.

Archaeological chronologies tend to conflate temporalities from all cultural contexts in a region without consideration for the different depositional trajectories and life histories of the objects that serve as the basis of those chronologies. Social variables, such as gender, age, status, and individual mobility, act on artifacts in ways that must be identified and differentiated in order for seriations derived from one context to be applicable in another. This article presents evidence from early Iron Age contexts in Southwest Germany to illustrate this phenomenon and discusses its ramifications from the perspective of a case study focusing on the mortuary landscape of the Heuneburg hillfort on the Danube River. Gender in particular is strongly marked in this society and can be shown to affect the depositional tempo of certain artifact categories, which have different social lives and depositional fates depending on context. Artifact assemblages vary not only in terms of archaeological context and temporality but also are impacted by the social personae of the human agents responsible for, or associated with, their deposition.

For historians, questions about what to call particular eras and how to conceptualize the temporal dynamics of change become particularly acute as we take on revisionist projects, such as writing and teaching feminist history, examining chronologically \"deep\" history, or placing history in a material as well as a social environment and in a global perspective. Temporal frameworks influence historical research even when it is located within a very limited time frame; temporalities and periodizations operate more explicitly in the teaching of survey courses. The particular periodization problems we focus on here emerged from teaching premodern world history with a focus on family and household dynamics. In trying to connect research on the domestic group as a site of world history with a historical narrative that begins with the emergence of human society and draws on evidence from around the globe, we were struck again and again by the problematic perspectives embedded in conventional periodizations. New directions in archaeological scholarship offer global historians insights and approaches with which to inform their temporal frameworks.

In this article I consider the issues of temporality and periodization in the ancient Near East under three rubrics: how modern scholars have periodized ancient Near Eastern history, how societies of the ancient Near East periodized their own history, and, more broadly, how they conceptualized the temporal dimensions of their world and mapped themselves onto time. In each case I illustrate the issue with a selection of examples, which in no way represent comprehensive coverage. Under the last rubric, I focus on Sumer and Akkad.

Population ageing and discourses on healthy ageing have led to a growing interest in social dancing for seniors. While senior dance has been described as both common and contributing to good health, the fundamental connection between bodily and temporal dimensions has been fairly neglected. As a result, there is a risk of portraying dance among older adults as a general practice, while at the same time the senior dance's potential to shed light on relations between temporality and ageing is not utilised. Based on qualitative interviews with 25 women and eight men, aged 52–81, in Sweden, whose main leisure activity was dancing, this article sheds light on this knowledge gap by illustrating the pleasurable experiences of senior dance. The results illustrate that the pleasurable experiences of dancing can be understood as three different experiences of temporality: embodied experience of extended present, an interaction with synchronised transcending subjectivities and age identities with unbroken temporality. The results also highlight the central role that temporal aspects play in processes around subjectivities in later life, as well as the close connection between ageing embodiment and temporality. They also illustrate the ability of dance to create wellbeing, not only through its physical elements, but also through the sociality that constitutes the core of dancing. In light of these results, the article argues that the temporal processes relate to individuals’ diverse relationship with the world and that they therefore play a central role in subjective experiences of ageing.