Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically. Although it was carefully reviewed, it may still contain errors and may not correspond exactly to the recorded audio track. Time stamps are indicative and may not correspond to the edited audio-video recording provided.
Keri Facer (00:02)
So, hello everybody. Welcome back. Today we're talking in particular about a theme that keeps coming up in this podcast series, which is the politics of time. We're gonna look at how time is organized and used to produce inequalities and how people might be fighting back in smaller and larger ways. We're getting into the concept of temporal resistance today, the strategies that are emerging to challenge power through temporal practices, and to challenge the way that power uses time for its own ends. We've got three fantastic guests with us. Professor Heila Lotz-Sisitka holds the Distinguished Research Chair on Global Change and Social Learning Systems at Rhodes University in South Africa. She's recognized internationally for her work on transgressive learning, which generates critical thinking and collective agency and challenges normalized patterns of injustice and inherited colonialism. Her work has seen her taking a lead amongst other things in transforming South Africa's post-apartheid curriculum and in developing a green skills agenda across Africa. Today, Heila, welcome. It's lovely to have you here. We're particularly interested in your work on possibility knowledges and energy transitions in South Africa. Thanks for joining us. Our second guest is the wonderful Professor Astrid Ulloa from the National University of Columbia. Astrid works on indigenous movements, indigenous autonomy, territoriality, extractivisms and anthropology of the environment. And today we're very interested in talking with you, Astrid, about your work with the Wayúu of Northern Columbia and their strategies of resistance to the imposition of wind farms. And finally, we have one of my brilliant colleagues, Dr. Alison Oldfield from the University of Bristol, who has a background as a teacher and a youth worker and is now an interdisciplinary researcher looking specifically at questions of education, technology, inclusion and sustainability. Alison has a very wide range of interests ranging from critical uses of AI to craftivism for climate change education. And today we're very interested in your work on autistic young people's experiences of outdoor learning and the politics of time, just transitions and disability rights. So, welcome all of you. We're really happy to have you here. We're going to explore questions of time and temporal resistance from your three very, very different locations and experiences and try to see where the threads are to connect them all up. But before we start, let's start with a question of your own relationship to time and power. Where do you situate yourself in this? I wonder if you could tell us a little something about your own relationship with time yourselves. Is it an easy one? Do you get on with time? Maybe, Heila, how's your relationship with time?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (02:57)
Yeah, thank you, Keri, for that question. You know, I was thinking a lot about it. And I thought, well, there's two ways to answer this. In some ways, my relationship with time is really, it feels incredibly simple because, of course, one is just part of the flow of existence. And you're just a tiny speck of movement in a much larger and longer cycles of geohistorical time. And that's really quite a fairly simple thing to think about and live with. And then in other ways, my relationship with time feels incredibly complex and difficult, actually. And this is especially when I give attention to how to think about time and politics, time in the just transition, what time and justice in the just transition means in a context like ours where we've had such a long timescape of inequality, injustice and colonial intrusion, you know, 350 years, which, of course, continues into the present, even though we've had the 1994 event of democracy in South Africa. So, you're sitting in a context where you're feeling, how do you think this question of time in such a context? And especially when people's concepts of time have been corrupted and marginalized, even stolen away from them. And, so, we sort of remain in this colonial modernity's march through time. And how to deal with that when we now have the timescapes emerging around climate change and how to respond to those? Yeah, so I think both simple and very complex.
Keri Facer (04:25)
Thanks, Heila. Alison, how about you? What's your relationship with time like?
Alison Oldfield (04:30)
Thanks, Keri. It's really nice to be here with everyone. I don't think it's a very easy question for me to answer, actually. And maybe, Heila, what you said kind of resonates with how I feel sometimes about it, where I think about time all the time, because I'm always scheduling things or making plans. And I think it's safe to say that most of my adult life I've been, I guess, deeply embedded in a sense of linear time and standardization and, you know, normative senses of time where what I do and how productive I am is accounted in that clock time, really. I feel like it's shifting though, I have to say. And I think, you know, the work I've been doing reflecting on time also helps me shift that and think about other orientations to time or other ways of how I myself fit best in those different thinking of time. So, it's made me think that maybe as I'm getting older, having a family, like coordination of other kinds of rhythms in my life, maybe it's more accounting for ritual rather than senses of clock time. So, thinking about when I get up in the morning, not by the clock, but by where the seasons are and how my body rhythm is working, daylight and dark seasons, what's growing in the garden. So, these kinds of more senses of ritual and seasonal reactions to time, I think, is a bit more where I am now.
Keri Facer (06:00)
Thanks, Alison. I also know that you're an astonishing flower farmer and that you are very connected in with those seasonal times. And Astrid, what about you? What's your relationship with time?
Thank you, Keri. For me, as an anthropologist, I have been related with indigenous people for many years. So, my relation with the time has been based on the understanding of diversity, also how they relate the time with cultural practices and spiritual rituals, also, the idea of a different notion of time that is a spiral time. But something that is very special for me is the idea that the mountains, the stones and the wind have their own time and they collapse with the human times. For me, it's a long period of time, it's a deep time for them.
Keri Facer (06:59)
Thanks Astrid. Thank you for bringing in the geological time, the times of the mountains, the times of the rocks, the times of the broader planet. It's wonderful to have that sitting around us as we have this conversation. So, as we move on, think the aim really is to shift into this discussion of temporal resistance, the concept of temporal refusal as well. But to do that, I think we need to start off with a discussion of how we think time and power relate to each other. there's been a long study of histories of how time is used, particularly how clocks are used, to dominate and control others. I came across a wonderful quotation this morning from E.P. Thompson. It's in a book by David Rooney. He says, "One recurrent form of revolt within Western industrial capitalism has often taken the form of flouting the urgency of respectable time values." And he says that people have done that from Beatniks to Bohemians. And that's a study of the kind of history of Western industrial time. But we can also see strikes in Bombay in 1905 against the imposition of industrial capitalist time. We can see strikes in Durban in the early 20th century. So, before we get into the question of resistance, I wonder if I could invite you each to sort of reflect a little bit on how you see time and power relating to each other in the areas that you're working on. Astrid, how do you see time and power related in, Columbia, particularly around green infrastructure, wind farm investments and so forth?
Astrid Ulloa (08:42)
Thank you, Keri, for the question. Yes, in order to relate my research with indigenous people in Colombia, I will focus on the relationship in La Guajira. La Guajira, Colombia, is a semi-desertic area. Most of the projects about energy transition will impose in indigenous people's territory, There will be 57 wind farms with 2830 wind turbines. And this process of implementing the energy transition respond to the urgency, a temporal acceleration of actions against climate change, which, in turn, respond to timeframes of government policies and international agreements. So, in this way, a modern temporality is imposed which respond to a specific ontology of time, which generates a temporal spatial disjunction in the indigenous people territory. Windfarms are imposed under an hegemonic temporality basis of linear conception, past, present and future. But it's also related with the cycles of the capitalist process. this is a relation of power that imposed different kind of temporalities and it politicized the Wayúu ideas of time. As I told you before, they have a different notion of time. For example, the wind, the mountain caps, their own specific times. All of implies violence for them, temporal violence.
Keri Facer (10:32)
So, this concept of temporal violence then that you've just brought in, in terms of the intersection of time and power, if I hear you right, you're talking about the kind of eradication of other temporalities, or in fact, the othering of plural temporalities, the imposition of timeframes to the detriment of the other timeframes So, That's one of the ways that power operates you're saying, is to obscure the different ontologies and the different temporal practices that might already exist in these places. Alison, how does this relate to your work, to the questions of disability rights and justice
Alison Oldfield (11:14)
So there are, I mean, A number of disability scholars and activists in communities and organizations have talked about and written about their own experiences, their lived experiences of time, and how those differ and can contradict what they also call normative time, so kind of linear, progressive, standardized ways, capitalist ways of thinking about and acting in time. And one of the concepts that some of these writers and scholars have come up with is this idea of crip time. And, you know, that being a word that it was a derogatory, stigmatizing kind of word. And these scholars have taken that word back and by by cryptime, they mean kind of individual or unique orientations to time of bodies and minds. So, Alison Kafer, who's one of the scholars who talks about this, defines it as as bending the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds, rather than bending bodies and minds to meet the clock. And, so, in this way, I suppose they talk about what might be called ableist or, you know, biased towards non-disabled people. Ableist assumptions about time... and within that is ideas about what makes bodies and minds valuable and productive in our world. And if it's by a capitalist or linear, you know, that kind of standardized clock time, well, then disabled bodies and minds will be seen as less of lesser value and as less productive. So, in that sense, I think There's that sense for me of the power in relation to time.
Keri Facer (12:46)
And so if those bodies are seen as less productive, then how, how does that operationalize itself in political debates or settings? Do we see examples of how these, how different ways of being in time are excluded or marginalized? Are there examples of how that happens in this literature?
Alison Oldfield (13:06)
There's something about a sense of our bodies and minds developing in linear and progressive and kind of one way fashions when in reality, you know, are we develop and we live in our lives in ways that kind of go back and forth. And, so, you can feel, I suppose, a sense of feeling out of sync, unable to participate, you know, in worlds that maybe aren't accessible or were made inclusive for these different ways of bodies and minds being in time.
Keri Facer (13:31)
Hmm. All That ties into to Arturo Escobar's work as a critique of development thinking. And we can see that that linear deployment of a singular mode of existing and moving through time as something that is getting applied to both people and to countries and to places, as though there's only one way of being in time. So, the deployment of power, if we're thinking about temporal power, is the ability to legislate, it seems then, over which sort of times matter and which sorts of times are valued. Heila, what about you? How about in your setting? How do you see time being deployed in relation to power and power through time in South Africa?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (14:13)
I guess We're sitting with very similar kinds of challenges here, and especially in the energy transition, because there's so much going on in that energy transition at the moment. But it's so heavily directed, actually, by these long-ranging temporality injustice intersections that come from, you know, so long back, for example, you know, the entire country was constructed on extractivism actually producing the coal system that we now are trying to resolve through the just energy transition. But, of course, it's a phenomenon that's been actually ended up almost dehumanizing, you know, large proportions of our population. Black people were treated as cheap labour for the mines and were moved into reserves and then put onto trains and taken up to the mining areas. And then, of course, They were then structured into labour time that was controlled by the colonial industrial matrix of power. And interestingly enough, the commercial coal mining started in the 1880s, but it was only in 1990 that we first saw a decent health and safety act for mine workers in the country. And, so, we see this whole system of contradiction, actually, because now the same very same coal system is the one that they're trying to use to provide access to energy for all of the country's people. It's also a source of black economic empowerment for people. But now, with climate change, we've got us trying to reduce our reliance on coal at the same time that we're trying to work with coal as a transformative tool. So, there's so much contradiction actually sitting in this sort of temporality/ power intersection, which kind of makes its way into the present. But it has these deep seated relations in the past. And, so, it's very difficult to begin to think about how do we give adequate attention to justice and time and that relationship in the just transition as we move both to coal and also away from coal? And then how do we try to not reproduce injustice in that process? And I think one of the challenge we have is this new narrative of urgency that's coming with the capitalist colonial matrix of now it's technologically driven and it's technology import-driven. And it's coming with so much international funding, similar to what Astrid was talking about with the wind farms and so on. And what this does is it overshadows politics of risk and exclusion and these histories of contradiction in the temporality/power relationship. So, I think we've got a lot to work on to try to really challenge this linear modernist industrial form of temporal power and control that comes with these very dominant narratives, and then how to avoid them producing new forms of social control and exclusion that come with these urgency discourses. It really requires quite a lot of imagination and also a different form of politics, I think, much more the kind of engaged, inclusive social politics that Astrid was referring to, but also Alison was talking about. So, I think from my side, that's the sort of space trying to make sense of this sort of politics as both in the here and now, but also facing the future and then also being connected into this sort of deep and complex and rather ugly past actually.
Keri Facer (17:57)
Thanks, Heila. We have this language of urgency, the concept of a just transition, which implies a present state that will move to another state and the idea that we have to push through very, very quickly. So, one of the things I always find myself struggling with is, yes, there is an urgency. There is an increase in carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere and that that is going to produce its own injustices. And yet we see that language of urgency being mobilized to reproduce and to intensify inequalities as the three of you have talked about. How do we deal with that contradiction between a known urgency and then the deployment of urgency as a temporal politics? Do you have any thoughts on that from your own work?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (18:50)
Well, what we've been trying to do is to, I guess, create spaces where we can actually open enough time, like time for thinking time, right? And time for opening up the contradictions and to understand them better and then to think about what are the possibilities of moving out of those stuck points so that we don't get stuck in them again? And, for me, that's an educational process actually as much as it's a political process. And I guess I like to work in, you know, social learning formations around quite complex issues with multiple actors and then to spend time with them to open these questions up and then to think alternatives and then also to think about how do we actually do things. And it's quite interesting how that does actually occur. So, I think that's probably one of the approaches that we've been trying to use. Because otherwise, I think you really just are left with the dominant narrative and critiquing the dominant narrative, which to me is important. But it's probably not adequate for the kind of society that we need to create here. We have to co-create that society. It can't just be a top-down imposition like we had before. So, it's that space that's important.
Keri Facer (20:09)
Yeah, and it feels to me that if we're not careful, we just end up in another binary opposition. We get the language of urgency that has to be resisted. And then those people who resist get locked or get framed as being locked in a different time in terms of being out of time. And we've seen that happen to indigenous groups for the last few centuries, that sense of being presented as out of time and therefore as being dismissed. If you're not in the right time, how can you be listened to is also one of the challenges. Alison, did you want to pick up on any of that?
Alison Oldfield (20:46)
Well, I guess the only thing I was going to say is sometimes it does feel really overwhelming, but I think there's just remembering that we're not starting from scratch. From my work and reading of what's gone on in disability communities and scholars working in that area is there's a whole lot of learning that we can do from people who have different ways of thinking about this and living in time in a sense. And some of the people who are in these communities and these activist groups say, we need to expect the future itself to be more disabled, right? In terms of individual bodies, in terms of our ecosystems, in terms of changing and new diseases. And there are a lot of people who have experience of being creative and finding nuanced ways of living in different forms of time and in communities that maybe aren't what we expected, aren't as accessible as we expected, feel a bit broken in certain ways. So, I think it's being aware of and being open to a lot of learning that we as societies can do from people who bring different knowledge from that.
Keri Facer (21:52)
Thank you.
Astrid Ulloa (21:52)
Keri I want to say something. Yes, because you were talking about the transitions and how it's urgent, and we agree with that. But, for me, I don't like to use that word. I use the radical social environmental transformations because at the end, we need to transform our relationship with the more than humans because most of the energy transition, at least in Latin America and in Colombia, are reproducing again the same process, colonial process, extraction And in this moment, in the global context, we are in a different moment. I don't know if we will continue with this discussion about energy transition because some countries, they don't want to continue with that. because it's again the idea of development as an imposition for all around the world. I am trying to change not only the words, but the way that we have to think in that.
Keri Facer (22:52)
I mean, that to me is really fascinating because what I'm hearing you all say is actually a shift away from this language of transition that sort of implies a before and an after. And that implies, okay, we know where we're going. We know what it looks like. We shift from where we are here to where we might be there, to this word of transformation. And I can hear all three of you talking about imagination as well in here somewhere, the deep creativity of trying to surface and to open up other possibilities that we can't imagine yet. And that's a very different temporal frame and a temporal practice from, okay, here's our blueprint. This is the future that we're going to. We just need to kind of drag everybody along into it, preferably quickly, to actually, we don't know what that future is. We need to experiment. We need to recover maybe lost histories. We need to create a space of plural exploration in order to allow a transformation that might involve letting things go, rather than simply shifting from one place to the other.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (23:56)
I just wanted to highlight really the richness of the diversity of forms of temporal impositions that you mentioned. I mean, there is the imposition of temporal norms. There is the imposition of temporal ontologies or conception of times. There is the imposition of tempo and rhythm of change. There is the imposition of a historical process and a conception of historical development in a way that is reproduced. So, it seems through the different example that you're mentioning that there is a kind of intertwined threads of impositions that kind of reinforce each other to some extent. I was wondering if you can say something about how those different forms of imposition reinforce themselves because it seems that we are struggling also with forces that kind of add to each other, cultural, institutional, based on a different scale in the everyday but also at the historical level...
Alison Oldfield (24:59)
I can talk a little bit about an example from my doctoral study. So, I did an ethnographic study of autistic young people who were in a school setting, but went out to do outdoor learning every week. So, for a year, I followed them from their classrooms to their outdoor learning. And it was a socio material study, so I was interested in how the social and the material interactions produced, you know, what happened. And in terms of thinking about these impositions, I think of different kind of temporal frames. One thing that I definitely noticed in these observations with these young people and their teachers, there were very, very clear routines that were managed and controlled and put in place in the classroom. And that also, you know, carried on outside. So, really clear routines about patterns of of timing... What happened first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and some of this was because it's a school setting. Schools often operate in very controlled timetables. But it was more than that as well, I think. There's a common characterization of autism that it has a sense of rigidity and it, you know, holds to routine. There's some psychological developmental assumptions about how autism presents and what that means for the young people themselves. And some of them did really like routine, but it was really controlled by, I think, the staff and the teachers who were very worried what would happen if those routines fell out of place. And then one other layer that was on top of that is some of these young people worked with workers who were trained in what was called ABA, so, that's Applied Behavioral Analysis. And this is a kind of intervention that happens with autistic people to try and support them to develop certain behaviors. These are often seen to be behaviors towards more typical ways of behaving in the world. So, it might be, you know, if an autistic person or a young person was stimming, so they were doing kind of repeated physical movements, the ABA intervention might be to try and, you know, have them stop that or quiet their hands. So, it's quite a popular but also very controversial way of working with autistic people. And, so, in this sense for me, there were multiple layers of kind of temporal constraints that were placed on these young people in terms of routines. And yet there were also constantly bubbling up senses of resistance and interruption and disruption. That was one of the areas where, for me, it was really clear that there was this real kind of tension and friction in terms of time.
Keri Facer (27:31)
Thanks, Alison. I love this idea of bubbling up layers of resistance. And to be honest, the history of time seems to suggest that it is impossible to have a singular conception of time that doesn't generate some sort of resistance. So the question is, is there violence used to control, to impose, to insist, or how would you create a sort of more gentle holding of these multiplicities? Heila, I think you were going to say something in response to what Michel was saying.
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (27:57)
Yeah, maybe I'll just respond briefly. I think what Michel was pointing to is how do these work together? And, in my observations, I think what happens is that you get a kind of construction of the unidimensional understanding of ways of doing things and then also the temporalities that go with them. And that, of course, is reductionist. So, there's this process of explicitly producing reductionist ways of thinking and being in the world. And one example that we're struggling with at the moment is that in the so-called just transition, there's so much emphasis now on the new technologies, and then we're looking at the skills system. So, when you look at the skills system, all the skills that are related to transitioning, the energy movements and so on, they get reduced to the technology, so you only get skills programs related to this aspect of wind farming or this aspect of the solar renewable energy system and all other aspects are just not included. So, the reductionism and this practice of narrowing, I think, is one of the mechanisms that allows these forms of temporal power to intersect and then to make things so difficult to move out of for people. How you then counter that reductionism and the reductionist structuring of time... I think more plural approaches... you've got to surface them, open them up, create the space for them, and then you've got to work them into the imaginary of the people. I can give one example of the One Ocean Hub, where they were working with ancestral time of the traditional healers and their relationship to the ocean. And then when we had the oil and gas drilling, the seismic surveys coming in, they actually went to court. They took the ancestral knowledge of the traditional healers to court, and they included it as evidence in the court case. Through that, they were able to include cultural rights into environmental justice legislation, and they actually won the court case. So, it's really an interesting process that they followed to counteract that narrowness and that narrowing, in this case, of the law and assumptions about the ocean and people's relations to the ocean.
Keri Facer (30:20)
Thanks, Heila. Astrid, I think you wanted to come in.
Astrid Ulloa (30:23)
Yes, it is about imposition of times because thinking about the indigenous peoples' territory in Colombia, there is a different kind of imposition. Imposition that they have to save the world because in their territory they have to have the energy transition process. So, this is an imposition even though their territory will be sacrificed. They don't care, yes? Imposition because they have to have in their territory for 30 years or more wind turbines. And a lot of the policy agreements, they have to follow the rule. They don't even know that. They don't even speak Spanish. So, it is very unjust to impose different kinds of rhythms, different kinds of times, and they are in the middle and they don't know exactly what's going on with wind parks in the future. The future is also an imposition because they have another ways of life.
Keri Facer (31:30)
phrase is a really interesting one, The future is also an imposition... Because In modernist temporality, you've got this idea of the future as, you know, this utopian place that we are moving towards, this concept of progress. And it's very embedded in Western thinking, that the future is a space of possibility. But you're talking Astrid about the future, and the saving the world being something that is now imposed, a whole community, a whole nation being required to sacrifice themselves in service of somebody else's future vision. So, the intersection of time and space here seems particularly important. Whose future exists where, for what purposes, and who gets to mobilize that future in order to demand certain changes, because we could obviously equally mobilize the future of urgent responses to climate change by demanding that those of us in the West radically transform our practices and habits. So, yeah.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (32:28)
Among the forces and the struggles that you are bringing in the conversation, I mean, there is colonialism, there is political struggles, institutional imposition, the imposition of norms, et cetera. In which way, mobilizing the language of time adds something to the interpretation and the understanding of what is at stake from a political perspective?
Astrid Ulloa (32:55)
As I told before, yes, the imposition of time and the urgency and the idea of the future, like a perfect future, a technological future, became like a reality. Everybody has to embrace that. But, for me, working with indigenous people, when they see that for 30 years, it will be occupied, their territory, times became important time to fight because for 30 years, many generations, they will change the space and the times and the rhythms because for them, the space is not a space, it's the territory and the territory is embedded with the water, with the winds, with the different non-humans... All of them will affected by the imposition of this kind of solution to confront climate change. So, for me, in this moment time is very important because they are fighting for continuing their life, their life as they want to live, not the life that we want to live or the global ideas want to live. They demand autonomy and self-determination to continue with the way that they have lived for many years, many centuries, and they want to continue like that.
Keri Facer (34:13)
That brings me to the work of our colleagues, Frida, Catherine and Matthew who are working on concepts of temporal sovereignty. What does it mean to have sovereignty or autonomy over time? Is it possible? We'll be talking about with that with them in another podcast episode. I'd like to move on from this definition of time and power to this question of temporal resistance. Do you have examples of where power might be resisted through temporal practices? I've already mentioned people blowing up clocks, but we also have histories of go slows, we have histories of refusing to work at the speed that we're set. So, where do you see examples of temporal resistance in the work that you're all doing? How is time being deployed as a strategy? Or maybe it isn't, maybe there's other forms of resistance. Heila, I was interested in you looking at the kind of breakdowns between water supply, energy breakdown, and you were talking about this generating local arrhythmias, so, moments of disruption of habitual rhythm. And you were suggesting that these might be sources of possibility knowledges. I wonder if you could talk that through for us as a sort of politics of resistance, if that's how you see it?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (35:43)
Yeah, thanks, Keri. Yeah, it's been very interesting, actually. I mentioned earlier, you know, the longer sort of macro level issues that we're dealing with... they also produce micro level experiences for people. So, for example, when your energy system keeps failing or the water supply system fails, it produces arrhythmias in your context. And it's been interesting also to be part of, but also to observe how people are responding to this and what that means actually for temporal resistance. So, what we've seen, for example, with the water supply disruptions is that we now have communities coming together and beginning to think about what are the possibilities for resolving some of these challenges. Five years later, we can see rainwater harvesting practices across our campus, across our town, across our communities, and quite a lot of sort of collaborative work to make that happen outside of the mainstream, you know, matrix of power, if you want to call it that. So, it seems to be catalytic of more participatory inclusive forms of democracy in the just transition and, therefore, seems to be making the, if we want to call it, the transition more just, because it's more inclusive. Similarly with energy, we're starting to see new forms of energy democracy where people are actually taking ownership of energy systems and wanting to set up their own energy systems in smaller clusters and communities. And even the government now is starting to put smaller microgrids into practice and then working with communities to take ownership of these microgrids so that you're getting a different structure to the energy and the water system, which is very interesting. And that, I think, is a result of these arrhythmias and trying to maximize the co-engagement around these arrhythmias in what would otherwise be a sort of taken for granted, normalized pattern of living. So, there's something interesting in that from a possibility knowledge perspective, because I think they can also help us to reframe concepts of time in the just transition, you know, from the master narratives of urgency that are being flown in by the international agencies and funders to drive this technological just transition, to more locally constituted inclusive and democratic forms of possible responses to water and energy issues and crises that need to be worked out and are being worked out amongst people. Of course, that's not an easy process and it would be better if we could do it together with the sort of systems that are meant to support and serve people. But of course, that doesn't always work. So, there's a resistance politics that's coming through in a transformed practice, which is interesting as well, I think. Yeah.
Keri Facer (38:41)
It makes me think of the work on the glitch in feminist literature that talks about the sort of moment when the infrastructure or the system just sort of glitches and it creates a little tiny gap or an opening. It's like the vision of the possibility, the moment of breakage as a space that can be kind of woven, kind of dug into and opened up to create something new. And again, that's like the opposite of transition, isn't it? Because transition is a literature of like, you go from here to here and it's all smooth. It's about kind of covering up the gap, whereas the concept of the glitch or the breakdown or the arrhythmia, to me is like creating a time within time that didn't exist before, something that we can go into deeper.
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (39:32)
Yeah, absolutely. We've also realized that it needs a lot of commitment and energy in what we've been calling present-sensing. So, to be part of that present and to really begin to understand it collectively and carefully. So, it's actually brought in times of community and care and time for working and thinking together and, so, it's actually shifted the actual process of temporality interaction as well. So, that's why I think it is something that we can work more with in terms of possibility knowledge. But what we've also been trying to do is to ground that a little bit more in African senses of time, which give much more attention to the thick present and the relationship between the present and the past, and then what can emerge from that recursive relationship into the more imminent present rather than the sort of futures planning forms of present that come with the instrumentalist tools that people plan futures for others and then try to impose them as Astrid was saying.
Keri Facer (40:40)
That seems so powerful, the present is the site of resistance and possibility rather than the future. So, this is a kind of fundamental reframing of the kind of temporal frame of liberation from this future promise to this imminent possibility. Thanks, Heila. That's a really helpful insight into that. Alison, I'm thinking about, you know, the moments of disruption, the micro forms of resistance that came out in your work.
Alison Oldfield (41:09)
Yeah, I mean, what you were talking about, Heila, really did make me think about some of the things that had happened as well in my research. Going back and thinking about those routines that were existing in the school, in the classroom, and then the routines that also happened outside... I said the routines got disrupted and they did to some extent because maybe of bad weather or absence or people's moods or a variety of things. Often the routines themselves really helped. So, the same activities were done, you know, in the same order every day. But what I came to realize is that those activities actually change dramatically week to week
Within these kind of organized, even imposed structures of time, there was also this kind of emergent unfolding that happened at the same time for the young people in interaction with their environment. So, for example, the first thing they did when we got up to their outdoor learning site was we went for a walk around the field that had raised beds and fruit trees. But that walk around the field was completely different every week because the grass had grown higher or it had been wet or the young people were wearing different kinds of clothes and, so, they were required to change their interaction with that environment. For some it was really challenging for various reasons, so, even though there was this routine, there was this kind of regular sense of moment by moment emergence. So, it was never actually the same even though there were these temporal structures
And I think those bodies in interaction, you know, resisted timetables and tempos and they could move at their own rhythms. And, so, there was the sense of them being able to do what interests them or where they wanted to go that didn't always fit in with the pace or the rhythm or the schedule that was set.
Keri Facer (42:53)
I'm getting such a wonderful picture of this deep, rich, emergent present that you're both drawing our attention to as a source of possibility, as a site for us to learn from and to pay attention to. Astrid, you've been wanting to say something, I think.
Astrid Ulloa (43:10)
Yes, thank you. In the case of the Guajira, I am thinking in the strategy of Wayúu people as a politics of refusal. They are not against the energy transition. They are against the way that there are imposed decisions about their territory. Most of the decisions were by the government, where they are imposing the wind farms 10 years before. So, for this reason they are against that imposition, but also they are trying to position the politics of life. What I mean with that, the politics of life, is to position the territory as a life, the territory also as a victim. And also the relationship embedded and embodied the territory and body, you cannot separate that. It's not humans and territory apart. And that's very important because, in this way, they are positioning the continuity of life at the networks of life in their territory. And they are positioned, for example, the idea of the winds, or not the idea because for them it's real. The winds, they have the right, they are political agents in their life. So, they are trying to position this kind of politics of life. Actually they use the same traditional legal actions and protests and everything, but in this way, they are positioning another idea of the life itself, the political vision for them as a nation.
Keri Facer (45:00)
So, we've got something very rich going on here. This concept of the politics of life, this thick time, this emergent present, this human and more than human interactions and encounters, the embodied multiple rhythms as a resource. I mean, that to me seems very different from a politics of refusal. Even if the politics of refusal may be necessary, it's a politics of refusal that also asserts something else in its place. Michel, I think you wanted to say something.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (45:31)
I appreciate the relation, even if all of you are working in different fields, but the fact that somewhere the resistance is embodied and goes through the way we regulate and negotiate those rhythms as we experience them in the body. So, imposition as being the imposition of a rhythm on our behaviors, on our habits, our routines, for instance, but also imposition that are resisted through the way we can find the energy or find the right patterns of behaviors that are right for us and that allow us to assert ourselves. So, I appreciate that role that is emerging here in the conversation assigned to the body and the rhythms of the body as a locus of agency in a way.
Astrid Ulloa (46:19)
I like the idea of the body, but you know the idea of the cuerpo territorio, that means body territory, emerged from the indigenous people in Latin America, from feminist women, indigenous women. And in La Guajira, it's not only body territory, but water and wind. This reason they claim for plural ways of being, doing, feeling, and knowing draw the relationality of diverse and multiple temporalities and specialities. That is very important because body is central in that relation, but no personal body. It's a collective body. That's a topic that I really like, body territory.
Keri Facer (47:05)
It seems to me to open up some really powerful reframings of what we think a political actor is. So, a shift away from the notion of the human as the sole force for political action and resistance, which happens so much, particularly in the climate field, we get these stories of the individual kind of hero doing their best on their own and then massively burning out if we're not careful. What does it mean for how we might cultivate a politics of temporal resistance, a politics of life? What are the implications from each of your settings for how we should act?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (47:40)
I must come back to the fact that I'm an educator, you know, and educators work with people. And it has been and still is and I think continues to be very productive space for rethinking education and what education is and could be, because for so long, education has been a practice of acculturation and transfer of existing cultures into communities, of part of some of the forms of coloniality that we are talking about here. So, to produce an alternative to that, I think one needs to have open process, more of these present-sensing spaces where you can find new possibility knowledges and then translate them, transfer them or, at the same time even, co-construct them into new possibility practices. And I think that what we're seeing is that, you know, the politics of land, the life, water, and these kinds of things can give us anchors into doing this kind of work. So, the T-learning labs are very much often centered around processes of producing food in communities or bringing water to produce food, or to engage with some of these energy contradictions that I talked about earlier, or the disruptions and so on. Because they seem to allow people to meet and gather and to begin to co-construct this possibility knowledges, and then the movement into alternative possibility practices. But what I'm also thinking of and what we're working on now is to think about, well, how do you actually strengthen those kind of strategies of present-sensing and in co-engaged possibility co-construction out of the thick presence with its kind of tight relationship, recursive relationship to the existing past? And then to try to develop new tools for that. So, for example, we're trying to start a local T- learning lab using photography as a mechanism to challenge this sort of currency of speed. There's this speed in producing images about life and then sharing them out. But to spend time with people, to actually take photographs and then to reflect on what they mean for multiple temporalities and possibilities of living and working better together in our community. So, to try to find different ways of doing this kind of work, I think, is a big challenge but not impossible. We've seen quite creative ways of doing this with use of animation, the photography, and storytelling you talked about earlier. You know, the one I'm really interested in at the moment is to try to start working with the vehicle mechanics and the petrol attendants because the just energy transition with the motor vehicles is literally going to shed diesel mechanics and petrol attendants, and they'll be without work and livelihoods so on. So, how do you now open a space for them to become part of thinking through what are the alternatives in such a situation, and how do we pursue those together? That type of a thing. So, I think the T-learning labs are very important spaces for this kind of work, not only to open the more democratic landscape of the so-called justice in the just transition, but also to develop new ways of doing this kind of work and then to enrich educational thinking because educational thinking seems to still be stuck in the, you know, well, we'll just develop a training program for people and then the transition will happen or the transformations will happen, but it doesn't, you know? It needs much more work than that as both I think you and Michel also know.
Keri Facer (51:32)
Thanks, Heila. Alison, where do we need to go to address the question of temporal politics in just transitions in the areas that you're working in?
Alison Oldfield (51:40)
Firstly, there's just a challenging of assumptions that there's one way for bodies and minds to be and to operate and to have value in the world, and, you know, listening to other people who might bring those other kinds of knowledges into the space. Matthew Scobie on this project pointed me out to a Maori glossary that was developed, I think it was about seven years ago. And one of the words in this glossary that had been created was a word for autism. Excuse my pronunciation, but I think it's Takiwātanga, which means "in one's own time and space." So there's a recognition of a temporal element and a way of being in the world. In terms of educational practice, Heila, I love the idea of present-sensing spaces. It really connects with some of the work from my study, which very much was about sensory experience because some of the young people that I worked with in the study didn't use verbal or spoken language. But having a simultaneous shared experience, especially in an outdoor space where the sensory experience could be really dynamic, quite vibrant, it allowed for a way for people to have a collective shared moment, even if it wasn't a shared understanding or knowing what someone experienced or what they believed or how they felt or what they knew. The bodies were having a collective shared experience and from that there could be a sense of connection and community. And, so, I think it's a really powerful idea of having kind of a collective presence. So, making space for people to be together and, you know, to then be able to develop and recognize values in ways of different knowledge and ways of experiencing. 'Cause young people experience the world so much differently than I did in the way that their behaviour demonstrated, and I learned so much from it.
Keri Facer (53:39)
Thanks, Alison. Astrid, what about you? What next? Where next for the Wayúu and where next for the politics of resistance to the imposition of wind farms like this? Can you see routes forward?
Astrid Ulloa (53:53)
I think in two different ways. One is after different collective meetings among the indigenous communities that will be affected they went to listen to the experience of the effects of the first wind farm that already doesn't work after 20 years, and it was very interesting. It was like a collective reflection about the impacts not only in sacred places, in the water, in the winds, but the impacts of this process among the community. And it was very interesting because they were sharing the experience and also they propose to dream. Wayúu people are oniric people. They need to dream and to be in contact with different spirits and draw the dreams they know how to deal with the problem. So, they are doing this kind of practice rituals among them to know how to face that. After that, I think the most important part, for me, is to rethink the idea of justice. What is justice for them? How they are claiming justice? Another kind of justice that recognizes this kind of plural visions of being in their territory and position the territory as a political actor. So, it's an open to rethink the idea of justice for me.
Keri Facer (55:28)
We're approaching the end now. So, I'm going to invite a kind of one sentence response to this massive question... How would you define the concept of temporal justice? What would temporal justice look like in each of your settings for each of you?
Astrid Ulloa (55:45)
I am trying to, in one word or in one concept, to merge the ideas of temporalities of the mountains, temporalities of the winds, temporalities of humans and more than humans in relational deep temporal justice.
Keri Facer (56:07)
Relational deep temporal justice. So, is it temporal justice is something about the right to maintain those webs of temporal relations in a form that they need? Yeah. It ties into some of the work that Michelle Bastian's been doing recently, also Deborah Bird-Rose, I think, and others. Alison, what about you? Do you have a definition of what temporal justice would constitute?
Astrid Ulloa (56:09)
Yes. Yeah, their ways of life.
Alison Oldfield (56:32)
I think, for me, it's a recognition and some sort of negotiated balancing or decision making of unique relations to time.
Keri Facer (56:43)
Wonderful. Thank you. Heila, what about you? Quick definition of temporal justice for you.
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (56:50)
I think, for me, it's very closely related to concepts of inclusion, actually, and being able to be in the process of defining what temporality means for you and also what justice means for you. And then producing the meanings of that in ways that everybody can be part of, you know, in different languages and cultural reference and so on. And to, you know, just be able to do that over this dominance of strict schedules and social controls and concepts like, well, time is money and don't waste time. So, to get rid of those very reductionist and narrowing ways of thinking about time and what it means in our lives, and how to be able to put part of a much more plural, inclusive way of thinking about time.
Keri Facer (57:42)
Okay. Well, that's giving us a program of research and activity to work on next. I want to finish with just one last question that I just like asking people, which is, as you know, there's a whole history in literature of having a time machine, which was used to just move backwards and forwards on a linear timeline. Now, we've all talked about much more complex and interesting ways of thinking about time. So, if you had a time machine or a time magic wand, or maybe a time spell that you could cast, what would you cast? What would it do? What would it enable you to do or be or enable others to do or be in the world? And I will start with Astrid because she is unmuted.
Astrid Ulloa (58:24)
It is interesting question. This kind of device are used to have the opportunity to include this idea of relational perspective of the time and include multiple temporalities, the times of living beings, which imply to consider a long duration of time. We, as humans, we think in a short time, but the geological time is completely different. So, to have the opportunity to explore these kind of dimensions of time, it will be nice. And maybe multi-species relationship with temporal diverse ontologies also to include diverse ontologies. You will explore like a network or relations at the same time. This device, it could be to allow us to reconstruct the effects of violent environments and to allow to think in another way about the suffering and pain of the multiple species that for long periods of time are suffering by the humans. I don't know the possibility.
Keri Facer (59:42)
Sounds wonderful. It sounds like an invitation to empathy to me, an invitation to empathy, to relationality, to connecting to an experience of time that's beyond our own. I can see some astonishing work coming out of that attempt to experience that multi-species temporality. Thanks Astrid. Alison, what about you? What would your magic wand or machine or spell or device enable you to do?
Alison Oldfield (1:00:11)
There's another project I'm working on and a PhD student is looking at trying to understand neurodiverse play in schools, so that's between autistic and non-autistic children. But with that relational sense of how can we help children understand how each other wants to play or how they're playing or, you know, what their role in this play happens to be. One of the things she's designed is a little bracelet, I mean, a wristwatch I suppose. It's got different buttons and it's an accompanying thing to the play, and the children can press the button depending on what kind of play mood they're in, in a sense. So, if they want to play on their own or if they're up for playing with others, or if they feel like they're really involved in social play, or they can make up with the buttons themselves. So, it just made me think about some kind of device that can accompany people but maybe designate or show off how they're feeling in terms of orientations to time or where they are at the time.
Keri Facer (1:01:09)
I love that. So, that sense of, you know what? Today, I really would like to think about... I'm dealing with my past, you know? Today, I'm really sitting with my history that I'm bringing into this space, or today, I really want to sink into the time of my body or something like that. What would your magic wand be, Heila? What would your time machine do?
Heila Lotz-Sisitka (1:01:31)
Yeah, I think I'm a bit of a magic realist, actually. So, I was actually thinking about the time machine and I'm thinking, well, we actually are already in one. And it's really one which we are already influencing the natural rhythms of the Earth systems. And, so, we actually are in a very big temporality experiment and we really don't know what's happening there, what the consequences are beyond, of course, the sort of predictive narratives that we get from modeling, mainly. So, I was thinking that it would be so nice to be able to be in this time machine, but to understand the consequences... Like in my garden, there's a plant, an aloe, that used to flower in December. It now flowers every year at the end of January. And the weaver birds are building their nests a month later. And the swallow migration has also shifted. So, we're seeing quite a shift in temporalities in the natural environment. And then we're seeing also, in our social environment, this sort of like impositions of temporalities that are poorly thought through when it comes to human life and social justice. And I felt it would be so nice to be in this time machine with its limited understanding of the consequences, and to explore people's understandings of how it feels to them because they are already in motion. You know? It was a little bit something like that that I thought about it when I thought about time machine.
Keri Facer (1:02:54)
Thanks. I think that's wonderful. That's a complete reframing of the question and a fairly useful challenge to my slight reliance on the idea of innovation as a different way of thinking with things. I mean, you're basically saying we're in a time machine already. How do we understand how it's already working? It's a wonderful place to finish. Thank you, all of you, Astrid Ulloa, Alison Oldfield, Heila Lotz-Sisitka, for both the work that you're doing, which is powerful, important, creative, inspiring work, and for taking time out to join me and Michel today on this podcast. Thanks a lot, everybody.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (1:03:35)
Thank you everyone.
