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We offer as our main theoretical contribution a conceptual framework for how the past is evoked in present identity reconstruction and the ways in which the past influences the articulation of claims for future identity. We introduce the notion of textual, material, and oral memory forms as the means by which organizational actors evoke the past. The conceptual framework is applied in a study of two occasions of identity reconstruction in the LEGO Group, which revealed differences in ways that the past was evoked and influenced claims for future identity. Our study suggests that (1) a longer time perspective in the use of memory enabled a longer time perspective in formulating claims for future identity, (2) a broader scope of articulated identity claims for the future was related to the combination of a broader range of memory forms, and (3) the depth of claims for future identity was related to the way in which memory forms were combined. At a more general level, our paper illustrates how viewing identity construction from the perspective of an ongoing present adds a new dimension to understanding the temporal dynamics of organizational identity.

This essay is a meditative reflection on the critical, creative, and narrative labour involved in making the community “real” as a part of contemporary lived and temporal experiences of modernity. I analyse the crucial role that fiction plays in realising the community. Taking Amitav Ghosh’s provocation regarding the “derangement” of normative notions of realism as the starting point, this essay re-examines the place of orality in the contemporary African novel. Chief among its claims is that orality and realism are companionate terms. The deployment of oral forms provides a more expansive view of reality that is otherwise unavailable within capitalist conceptions of time and linear development. In the essay, I read Véronique Tadjo’s ‘Ebola’ novel In the Company of Men (English trans. 2021) as an invitation to the community in the wake of the devastation struck by deadly diseases such as Ebola and COVID-19. I argue that Tadjo organises a literary imagination of community and solidarity as the basis of a collective reckoning that is yet to come. In this sense, the book operates as a “portal,” fashioning both a cultural memory of collective survival (from human and nonhuman perspectives) and raising an urgent, anticipatory call for more expansive forms of imagination facing the future.

What is time? And why does it matter to international politics? Despite evidence that time is central to political life, international-relations theories often take it for granted. Important efforts to address such oversights critique influential disciplinary assumptions and expand our perspective on temporal experience. But they do not substantially deepen our understanding of time, let alone its relationship to politics. International-relations theory retains entrenched habits of thinking and speaking about time that isolate inquiry, constrain dialogue, and reify time as a stand-alone object detached from social relations and processes. This theory note therefore reconstructs international relations’ temporal imagination. Instead of relying on pre-existing, static concepts of time, it develops a framework from the basic activity of timing: practical efforts to establish relationships between various changes according to a standard that enables orientation, direction, and control. Timing theory explains the political origins of time and the power of our most familiar ideas about it. It also resolves key problems attending other temporal research. Finally, it offers scholars more dynamic ways to analyze the temporal politics of important phenomena like war and identity. It thus highlights how, in both practice and theory, international politics is very much a matter of timing.

As the world rapidly becomes a different place for migrants and non-migrants alike, this article asks whether transnational migration scholars have an adequate conceptual toolkit to address the temporal dimensions of mobility regimes. The article notes the way those who initiated the transnational framework for the study of migration conceptualised temporality, critiques the failure of subsequent researchers to adequately address the rapidly altering conditions of migration and offers a concept of multiscalar conjunctural transformation. A multiscalar conjunctural approach allows researchers to address both time and space. It highlights emergent processes of capital accumulation by dispossession and the ways in which such processes are culturally, politically, socially and spatially constituted as people around the world respond to multiple forms of displacement and reconstitute their lives.

In this ethnographic study of firefighters we explore how routines are coordinated under high levels of temporal uncertainty—when the timing of critical events cannot be known in advance and temporal misalignment creates substantial risks. Such conditions render time-consuming incremental and situated forms of temporal structuring—the focus of previous research on temporal coordination—unfeasible. Our findings show that firefighters focused their efforts on enacting temporal autonomy or, as they called it, \"getting ahead of time.\" They gained temporal autonomy—the capacity to temporally uncouple from the unfolding situation to preserve the ability to adapt to autonomously selected events—by relying on rhythms they developed during training in performing individual routines and by opening up to the evolving situation only when transitioning between routines. Our study contributes to literature on temporal structuring by introducing temporal autonomy as a novel strategy for dealing with temporal contingencies. We also contribute to research on routine dynamics by introducing the performance of temporal boundaries as a previously unrecognized form of coordination within and among routines. Finally, we contribute to process research a method that allows analyzing complex temporal patterns and thus provides a novel way of visualizing processes.

Complementing readings in International Relations (IR) that understand Covid-19 as an Anthropocene effect, this article observes the pandemic as a laboratory for engagements with Anthropocene experience. It argues that the pandemic turn to dreams renegotiated the conditions of experienceability of Anthropocene temporality. Exploring the scientific, archival, and practical registers on which dreams attracted interest during the pandemic, the article traces how dreams were valued for their promise of capturing the affective exposure of subjects to the pandemic present. This conditioning of experienceability on the limits of the human subject resonates with the relational turn in IR and its affirmation of being-in-relation as a condition for becoming attuned to the Anthropocene. Drawing from Koselleck and Foucault, the article understands this resonance as indicative of a shared archive of experiments in transcending modern accounts of temporality. For this archive, rendering an Anthropocenic present experienceable requires a shift from the distanced account of a modern author-subject to a subject that gauges its own exposure to the present. Despite this ambition of the turn to dreams, the article also flags its constraints, observing how this turn regularly tipped back into reaffirming the modern subject.

Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography’s attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by different groups in order to examine broader questions of how we might come to understand data ethnographically.

Research Framework: In a sociocultural context where marriage and reproduction are fundamental components of social status, infertility is perceived as a threat to social order, prompting individual and family strategies to identify its causes and to find solutions. However, previous studies have often adopted medical definitions of infertility, focusing mainly on the biological dimension and neglecting social temporalities.Objectives: This article examines the influence of biological and social temporalities on the life courses of women facing infertility in Cameroon.Methodology: The sample is made up of seven women whom life stories were collected, transcribed and analyzed according to an inductive thematic approach using Nvivo software.Results: Infertile women navigate between sociocultural norms and their subjective perceptions of time, creating significant tensions. The unpredictability of social and family events strongly influences the coping strategies adopted by these women and their families. Ultimately, temporalities continuously reshape reproductive trajectories, highlighting the complexity and dynamics of infertility experiences in the Cameroonian context.Conclusion: The analysis of unpredictable events poses challenges that the notion of temporality helps to approach by providing a rhythm to the narrative. This rhythm highlights different areas of the life story, and the way in which the unpredictable event structures and reshapes them over time.Contribution: This article opens up new avenues of research on how to take account of “social” unpredictability in contexts where social norms and cultures are often thought of as stable and rigid, and life trajectories as linear.

Hollinshead proclaimed tourism worldmaking as the creative/imaginative and often false/faux processes that management agencies and mediating bodies use to favor particular representations of places and people. While this remains valid at an organizational level, the COVID-19 pandemic has radically (and maybe also hopefully) changed the very regimes of sensory apprehension on which tourism is based, thus also suggesting that we rethink the worldmaking aspects of its postindustrial creation (rather than production and consumption chains). Considering some recent discussions on what may happen to tourism after the end of the pandemic I claim that: 1) we should begin by reassessing the realm of the sensible, 2) talk more about \"travel worldmaking\", and 3) reconsider the centrality of the traveler's emotional work during world travels. The thesis develops at the intersection of the \"must\" (urgency to sustain), the \"ought\" (call to respect), and the \"desire\" (drive to enjoy). It calls for a reassessment of worldmaking agency as a structured form of action, which gestures towards a durable change in sensible entanglements between humans and the world. I engage in a critical collegial dialogue with Hollinshead and Vellah's thesis that tourism as a postcolonial or postindustrial moment per se contributes to postidentity. Instead, I argue that after the COVID-19 event (among other viral worldmaking events threatening to eliminate humanity), world travelers resort to what is deemed accessible through their sensory capabilities within structured conditions. Tourism is thus also reimagined at a sensible level separately from the organizational/institutional processes that Hollinshead and Vellah placed center stage in their thesis.