Published in October 2020 for Mobilities, the special issue On time: temporal and normative orderings of mobilities has been edited by Tobias Röhl (University of Siegen) Susann Wagenknecht (Technical University Dresden) and I (University of Bologna).
Our introduction discusses the literature and proposes a way to frame the discourse on time, normativity and mobility, also offering as a first theoretical ground for the freshly started INFRATIME project. You can have a look at the abstract below and read the full introduction in open access at the Journal webpage.
ABSTRACT
This special issue about the ways in which mobilities, as they are made and lived, tamper with a multiplicity of entwined normative and temporal orderings. Questions concerning the entwinement of temporal and normative orderings are not only a challenge for social theory. Mobilities, notably, make the intricate multiplicity of normative and temporal orderings a palpable, everyday issue: distant spheres have to be linked, gaps to be bridged, connections forged, groups coordinated, timelines met, processes aligned etc. Serving flexibility, safety, synchronization and efficiency, contemporary mobilities involve diverse timings and commitments. This special issue, then, examines how multiple normative and temporal orderings unfold in practice, how they overlap and interfere, support and challenge one another. The multiple orderings that characterize today’s mobilities are typically coordinated by means of infrastructure – sequences, breaks and buffers, brackets, borders and walls – in ways that we describe as co-existence, conflict, containment, and collation. Full content >
