In this interview, Prof. Sabine Schmidt-Lauff sits down with Dr. Michel Alhadeff-Jones to explore the relationship between time and power in adult education, through the lens of rhythm theory.

The conversation explores the role of rhythms in the ways adults experience time, power and learning throughout their lives. Revisiting experiences such as burnout and dropouts, Michel introduces concepts he has been working on, such as temporal alienation, arrhythmia and rhythmic intelligence. He also explains why temporal literacy and temporal imagination are important to help adults name, interpret and renegotiate the temporal tensions that shape their lives. He also suggests that adult educators may act as “temporal mediators” to support learners' efforts to synchronize the heterogeneous rhythms that compose their life, nurture the rhythms of transformation, and learn from diverse cultures of time in order to foster more balanced and emancipatory rhythms of living and learning.

The transcri...

Exploring the times and rhythms of a just transition

The result of a whole year of work, this new podcast (in English, with close captions in the video version) offers a sensitive and rigorous exploration of the ways in which our experience of time and rhythms shapes our view of the world and, more specifically, how we understand the issues associated with climate change and the transition to greater sustainability.

Hosted by Michel Alhadeff-Jones and Keri Facer, this podcast opens up a space for transdisciplinary reflection where knowledge from anthropology, architecture, the arts, ecology, education, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and political science intersect. Over the course of 11 episodes, Michel and Keri engage in dialogue with 21 researchers, activists, and artists from five continents to revisit our representations of time, question dominant rhythms, and imagine other, more sustainable and just temporalities.

This podcast is for anyone who wa...

Le 18 novembre 2025, l'Université de Fribourg a organisé son premier Café scientifique à Bulle, sur le thème "Récits intergénérationnels". Au cours de cette soirée, Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Tatjana Erard et Guillaume Prin ont répondu aux questions posées par une assemblée formée d'une septentaine de participant.e.s. Suite à cette rencontre, le journal La Liberté a interviewé Michel Alhadeff-Jones pour discuter de l'intérêt rencontré par les approches biographiques en Suisse Romande. Cet entretien a été l'occasion pour celui qui est également responsable du CAS "Récits de vie et accompagnement biographique" d'évoquer les origines des démarches de recueil et d'accompagnement biographique en Suisse Romande, ainsi que certaines des raisons qui expliquent l'intérêt observé pour ces pratiques, y compris dans le cadre du Certificat qu'il dirige en partenariat avec l'Institut Sunkhronos.

L'article - paru le 25 novembre 2025 - peut être consulté en ligne à l'adresse suivante: https://www.laliber...

EPALE is a European, multilingual, open membership community of adult learning professionals, including thousands of adult educators and trainers, guidance and support staff, researchers and academics, and policymakers. It is funded by the Erasmus+ programme and it is part of the European Union’s strategy to promote more and better learning opportunities for all adults.

This Fall EPALE is organizing is 2024 Community Conference online, on October 15, 16 and 17.

Michel Alhadeff-Jones will be one of the three keynote speakers invited to discuss his contribution on time, space and emancipatory education. In his speech, he will address questions such as: How can educational practices be redesigned to take into consideration the natural rhythms of human development and modern society's evolving dynamics? Can education help people give meaning to the temporal pressures they experience and truly liberate them from power structures that impose unsustainable cadences on them?Michel Alhadeff...

Avec le lancement des ateliers "Enrichir l’expérience de formation en s’appropriant son propre parcours", l'Institut Sunkhronos est heureux d'annoncer un nouveau partenariat avec le Centre pour la Formation Continue et à Distance de l'Université de Genève. 

Ces ateliers – animés par Ahidoba de Franchi et Michel Alhadeff-Jones – sont proposés gratuitement comme soutien à l’apprentissage des participant.e.s des formations continues diplômantes (CAS/DAS/MAS/DAPS) de l’Université de Genève. Ils offrent l’opportunité aux participant.e.s de revisiter des expériences issues de leurs parcours de vie et qui influencent aujourd’hui leur manière d’apprendre, afin de s'en servir comme ressources pour s'engager pleinement dans leur formation.

Comment notre parcours nous forme-t-il et comment apprenons-nous à nous former tout au long de la vie? Des premières expériences faites à l’école jusqu’à celles réalisées en formation continue, chacun-e traverse une multitude de situations (en famill...

The Sunkhronos Institute is proud to support the upcoming ESREA STREAM Network 2024 Research Symposium Series. This series of webinars will focus on the theme of transitions.

In this first STREAM Network webinars series, Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Fadia Dakka and Sabine Schmidt-Lauff, invite scholars from a broad range of disciplines to address transitional phenomena by mobilizing the conceptual nuance and richness encapsulated in related notions, such as “liminality”, "life course", “transgression”, "professional development", “virtualization”, “hybridity” and “dissipation”. These, in turn, will serve as entry points to articulate, debate and question how individuals and communities experience transitions. The seminars will be guided by (but not limited to) questions such as:

• How do we experience transitions? How do we learn from them?
• How do we theorize transitional processes? How do we anticipate them?
• How can we better navigate changes through calibration?
• How do we conceive the...

Following the 2023 Research Symposium Series on "Spaces, Times & the Rhythms of Adult Education", the 2024 TRC Lab Research Symposium Series will focus on the methodological potential of Rhythmanalysis. Both as an object of inquiry and as an interpretive lens, rhythm can offer untapped spaces for experimentation in human sciences but equally raises methodological dilemmas, especially at the stage of operationalization. In this series of webinars, we would like to explore methods, research designs, and clinical orientations, developed from, or inspired by Lefebvre's (1992/2004) undertheorized insights on rhythm. Hence we have invited 7 scholars from Brazil, Italy, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, who have worked with Rhythmanalysis in their respective fields or across disciplines, to share their experiences and foster debate around its affordances and limitations from a methodological perspective.

The seminars are also designed to enable a collective reflection on the current state...

Nous avons le plaisir d’annoncer l'ouverture des inscriptions pour la deuxième Journée d’Etudes sur les Processus d’Accompagnement et de Transformation (JEPAT), organisée en collaboration avec le Service de la formation continue de l’Université de Fribourg.

Cette journée se tiendra le jeudi 14 septembre 2023 (9h15-17h00) et elle portera sur le thème «Penser l’accompagnement dans la durée: Une question de rythme?» Elle proposera à des professionnel·le·s et des intervenant·e·s, issu·e·s d’horizons institutionnels et disciplinaires variés, de réfléchir sur les temporalités longues dans lesquelles s’inscrivent les démarches d’accompagnement et les moyens de réguler les rythmes qui permettent de concilier l’urgence du quotidien et le long terme.

Les JEPAT ont pour vocation de proposer un espace et un temps de formation, de réflexion, d’échange et de débat scientifique. Elles visent à questionner et à enrichir, dans une perspective transdisciplinaire, le développement des pratiques d’accom...

Since January 2023, Dr. Michel Alhadeff-Jones (TRC Lab) is a member of the Global Convening Programme "The Times of  Just Transition" funded by the British Academy, in partnership with the University fo Bristol (UK). The aim of this interdisciplinary programme is to explore the role of temporal frames in enabling and impeding democratic and equitable transitions towards sustainable futures.

This programme brings together scholars from six continents and 14 disciplines to transform our understanding of the role of time and timing in producing justice and injustice in sustainability transitions.

Working in highly diverse local sustainability struggles relating to land, cities, identities and the imagination - they explore how temporal frames and narratives are being (mis)used to define climate problems and solutions, how timing mechanisms prioritise, coordinate and exclude different actors and ways of life, how different rhythms of life are being aligned or alienated, and how uses of t...

Spaces, Times & the Rhythms of Adult Education is a new research symposium series hosted by Dr. Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Dr. Fadia Dakka, and Dr. Gaia Del Negro at the Sunkhronos Institute, running from January to June 2023 online. Eleven researchers from seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, United Kingdom) will share and discuss with the audience their research and experiences about spatial, temporal and rhythmic dimensions in education. The series aims at gathering a community of researchers, graduate students and practitioners from different linguistic, cultural and geographic areas, to join in an academic and practice-based conversation. Presentations will be made either in English or French, with live transcripts. The series will thus contribute to the advance of the TRC Lab agenda of research and foster the study of rhythmic intelligence and its modalities of development.

Registration is free and open to everyone at this link: https://www.sunkhron...