Navigating Shomoyscapes: Time and faculty life in the urban Global South

We aim to decenter the Global North knowledge production about time in higher education (HE) by introducing and applying a culturally sustaining concept of shomoyscapes. While the Bengali word “shomoy” literally means “time,” it goes beyond “clock time” and also refers to memories, present moments, feelings, a particular duration, and/or signifier for a temporal engagement. A shomoyscape entails a complex temporal landscape of different temporal categories, constraints, agencies, and to various degrees, embodies hybrid times (i.e., modern time coexisting with non-linear local/traditional time). Drawing on interviews and participant observations with 22 faculty in Dhaka, Bangladesh, we demonstrate the efficacy of shomoyscapes by illuminating how faculty experience, contest, and manipulate their time(s) amid rapid socio-economic transformations of Dhaka, an urban, Global South mega city. We show how shomoyscapes manifest as faculty experience temporal constraints, such as (a) traffic, (b) party-based university politics, and (c) caring for others. We suggest that Bangladeshi faculty experience and navigate shomoyscapes that are constituted by both larger temporal constraints (spatial, structural, or relational) and their temporal agency in response to these same constraints. Using a temporal lens, we contribute to a more in depth understanding of the experiences of faculty working and living in an urban, Global South context, highlighting how life “outside the academy” spills over into working “inside the academy,” rather than vice versa. We argue that shomoyscapes offer a useful temporal heuristic to help contextualize human/social relations in different arenas of social life that would otherwise remain invisible.

Generation and Ruination in the Display of Michelangelo’s Non-finito

Michelangelo Buonarroti left nearly half of the many sculptures he carved in his lifetime unfinished, their rough surfaces transgressing early modern norms of finish and decorum. Nonetheless these objects (called non-finito/i) were preserved, collected, and displayed in their incomplete states. This paper examines the sites in which Florentine and Roman collectors exhibited Michelangelo’s unfinished statues and demonstrates how the display strategies implemented within these sites sought to offset the expectation of finish that the non-finito failed to meet. By situating roughed sculptures within frameworks that evoked natural forces of accretion and generation or conjured archaeologies of ruination and restoration, collectors strategically blurred artistic, natural, and, temporal agency and fundamentally shaped how the viewer perceived and evaluated Michelangelo’s most anomalous works.

Waiting and temporal control: The temporal experience of long-term unemployment

This article analyses how long-term unemployed persons experience time during their unemployment trajectories. This article uses a combination of interviewing and participant drawings to study the experience of time passing during the unemployment trajectory. We focus on the experience of wait time and find that the wait experience varies with control: some clients experience temporal agency and others a loss of control over time. When the wait time is characterised by uncertainty and a loss of control over time, it reinforces an experience of stagnation in the unemployment trajectory and a feeling of being a temporal outsider, living a life on hold, in comparison to societal norms of a working life. For these clients, wait time adds to the burden of unemployment. For clients experiencing temporal agency, wait time is experienced as meaningful, even useful. These clients experience control over the wait time or that the wait time has a fortunate timing in relation to other things happening in the clients’ lives. Based on the analysis, temporal control is decisive for the long-term unemployed, and therefore, a focus on time is crucial both in research on social and employment services for vulnerable clients and in the practice field.

Shaping Markets Through Temporal, Constructive, and Interactive Agency

In this introductory essay, we develop a theoretical framework of agency as a basis for strategic shaping and market transformation. We conceive of agency as both constrained and enabled by structure, and we build on sociological views that treat market structures as pairings of cultural schemas and material resources that are mutually sustaining. Structures contain the seeds for change because contradictions and conflicts that are inherent to structure inspire agents to imagine a new order and provide pathways to enact them. We theorize three connected forms of agency. Constructive agency captures agents’ ability to differently apply schemas to mobilize resources and improve their strategic positions. Temporal agency underlies agents’ autonomy and individuation, and enables agents to envision new possibilities. Interactive agency captures the collective nature of agency, where interactions among heterogeneous actors provide opportunities for agents to persuade others of their changing conceptions and learn new schemas, expanding agents’ repertoires for shaping opportunities.

Ruins of pre-gentrification: Schrotthäuser and urban standstill in a postindustrial city

The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany’s poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city’s most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated for the district at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never really invested into the maintenance of their houses. The results are postindustrial ruins of a special kind: ruins of pre-gentrification. These ruins are former apartment houses whose ongoing decay materialises not just the general postindustrial decline of Bremerhaven, but results from the continued failure of the realization of gentrification. They are ruins of failed anticipation. As many of the people living in the district, these houses might still await a better future, but, statically speaking, time has run out for them. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap (‘Schrott’-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those that are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses’ material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants’ local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. This article maps their temporal agency in order to scrutinize social sciences approaches to the production of time. Whilst discussing recent contributions to the anthropological literature on time and infrastructure, I present these houses with their specific material properties as active partners in the co-production of time in this particular district, and its potential futures.

Mental health, subjectivity and the city: an ethnography of migrant stress in Shanghai

Ethnography, with its focus on everyday experience, can yield significant insights into understanding migrant mental health in contexts where signs of severe mental distress remain largely imperceptible, and more generally, into how stresses and strains are lived through the spaces, times and affective atmospheres of the city. Migrant ethnography can help us reconsider the oft-made connection between everyday stress and mental ill health. In this contribution, drawing on field evidence in central and peripheral Shanghai, we highlight the importance of attending to the forms of spatial and temporal agency through which migrants actively manage the ways in which the city affects their subjectivity. These everyday subjective practices serve to problematize the very concept of ‘mental health’. The paper engages in a critical dialogue with sociological and epidemiological research that assesses migrant mental health states through the lens of the vulnerability or resilience of this social group, often reducing citiness to a series of environmental ‘stressors’. Distinct from methods ascertaining or arguing against the prevalence of mental disorders among urban migrants, the insight of urban ethnography is to open up a space to explore the mediations that operate dialogically between the city as lived by migrants through particular places and situations and forms of distress.

Marvell and Elegy

Marvell’s work as an elegist foregrounds his shifting political allegiance during the decade after his return to England. His first two elegies—‘An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers’ (1648) and ‘Upon the Death of Lord Hastings’ (1649)—place him in royalist literary circles during the Second Civil War and its immediate aftermath, whereas ‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’ (1658‒9) testifies to his service to the Protectorate and personal relationship with Cromwell. In his elegies on Villiers and Hastings, Marvell uncovers the need for the historical and temporal agency that he later assigns to Cromwell in ‘An Horatian Ode’ and ‘The First Anniversary’. The death of Cromwell prompts Marvell to rework material and tropes from these earlier elegies to make sense of this seemingly immortal figure’s sudden mortality and to secure his former patron’s reputation and political legacy.