The University of Manchester

Department Member, CRESC-ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change

About

I completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales in 2009. I was then a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of British Columbia, before moving to the U.K. and taking up my current position at the University of Manchester.

My primary research interest is in exploring the varying modes in which communities respond to questions of diversity. My earliest work explored the problem of identity and was particularly engaged with feminist work on coalition and hybrid accounts of identity such as Donna Haraway’s and Gloria Anzaldúa's. What I found particularly interesting in this work is the way attempts to rethink community in terms of hybridity also appear to involve challenges to linear conceptions of time. I thus took up this problem in my Ph.D. thesis. I identified a failure to adequately address the political nature of 'public time' within prominent philosophical approaches to time and instead developed an interdisciplinary approach that draws on anthropology, sociology, feminist philosophy and continental philosophy.

I am fascinated by the way linear conceptions of time appear to promise a single reality or universal commensurability. I argue that this promise is problematically taken up as an implicit guide within community responses to diversity and social action. In contrast to much of the philosophical approach to time, I argue that time needs to be read as a multi-dimensional regulatory practice that implicates time in social methods of inclusion and exclusion. I am particularly interested in how implicit common sense assumptions about time can work to marginalise certain ways of living or certain modes of political action. In my work I also seek to illuminate the way conventional accounts of time are inter-weaved with less geometrical, more disjointed, hybrid accounts.

Since completing my Ph.D. I have extended the focus of my work to look at the way varying concepts of temporality and community are mobilised in the context of climate change and resource depletion. This project involves a number of case studies, with two currently underway. The first examines the concepts of time at work within the Transition movement. While the second, based on collaborative work with members of the Ecological Humanities group based in Australia, draws on work on multi-species communities and the relational nature of space and time to propose new modes of time-keeping in an age of climate change and mass extinctions.

I have also recently completed a Scoping Study of the work available on Time and Community as part of the UK Research Council's theme "Connected Communities". Further details available here:
http://www.temporalbelongings.org

The final short project report is available here (http://www.temporalbelongings.org/scoping-study.html) and you can download the bibliographic resource here (http://www.temporalbelongings.org/the-library.html) or view it online here (http://www.citeulike.org/group/14819)

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