Time plays a fundamental role in our lives spanning the deepest mysteries of the natural world, the formation of our societal and individual belief systems, and the decisions we make and the urgency with which we take them.
Our network seeks to tackle global challenges through fundamental and practical questions, such as:
- Understanding time – What actually is time, what significance does it have in our lives and how do we obtain our temporal perspective?
- Measuring time – What leading-edge techniques for measuring time, on both long and short timescales, can we develop and share across disciplines?
- Past, present and future – How does the past inform our understanding of the present and predictions for the future? Do we overemphasize the present and discount the future?
- Evolving time – How have technology and globalisation changed our experiences of time? How can we manage, respond and shape such evolution?
We aim to focus these questions around specific grand challenges including the climate and environmental crises, disaster risk reduction, socio-economic inequalities, questions of identity, our ageing population, and economic productivity.
If you would like to present at a future lecture, please email the Interdisciplinary Research Network for Time at networkfortime@leeds.ac.uk
Time seminar
3 July 2024, 12pm to 1.30pm (online / in person)
Speakers
Kate Simpson – School of Earth and Environment/English
Jamie Stephenson – Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute
How to attend
Location: Baines GR.03, University of Leeds
Attend online: Join via Microsoft Teams from 12.15pm
Time seminar abstracts
Polytemporal Poetics: Reimagining Deep Time
Kate Simpson: “As a practice-based researcher in the UK’s first Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme, my work bridges the fields of poetry and palaeontology. I seek to address a species-specific form of time bias which governs humanity’s destructive behaviour and stops us from addressing the ways our actions interact with the past, present, and future on non-human timescales. In this talk I will discuss my “timeful” creative writing methodology based on the work of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who states “that the world is made by–indeed, made of–time” (2020, 5), and how I explore the capacity for poetry to cultivate forms of time literacy that operate beyond the productivity of the present tense.”
Ambient Temporalities: Rethinking the Metaphysics of Time in the Anthropocene
Jamie Stephenson: “Immanuel Kant is often conveyed as a Platonic or Newtonian thinker of the temporal, expressing time as an absolute and continuous repository wherein all objects occur. However, what happens when Kantian ‘sublime’ time is reoriented towards a more discontinuous temporal register? Employing themes from Kant’s aesthetic writings, plus ideas of time in Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Graham Harman, this paper employs just such a reading, as a means of rethinking temporality as neither solely continuous nor discontinuous, but somewhere between these two determinations. This schema provides a provisional model for thinking posthuman time in new and productive ways: as ambient temporalities.”
Time, climate and the environment sandpit
26 July 2024, 10am to 4pm
The aim of this workshop is to jointly identify several concrete ideas/projects in this area that could be developed into grant proposals, PhD/MSc projects, or to add value to existing research projects.
Understanding and harnessing time is fundamental to addressing the climate and environmental crises. This need to improve our knowledge of time spans from understanding how the climate and Earth system works including:
- Elucidating the physical mechanisms of the Earth and climate systems.
- Understanding a history characterized by significant changes in ecosystems and biodiversity, climate and oceans, as well as our societal responses and resilience to them.
Through to providing the fundamental framework through which we must develop and communicate policy/solutions including:
- Understanding perceptions of risk and our willingness to emphasize the present and discount the future.
- Our sense of responsibility and climate justice.
- Our feeling of agency to influence a distant and uncertain future.
The day will consist of a morning to identify specific ideas and suggestions from attendees, to then sketch them out and pitch to others.
In the afternoon, we will workshop some of the suggestions in more detail. We should be able to provide some small amounts of funding for these groups to meet up again to work on their proposals further.
Initial ideas
We have developed some initial ideas for workshopping from our personal research, but we would like to hear your ideas too.
The Epistemology of Weather and Climate Prediction
Doug Parker (Leeds) and Marian Baldissera-Pacchetti (Leeds/UCL)
How do we design good communication of weather and climate predictions for diverse user communities? Confidence in future prediction of the climate system is essential if we want people to consider this information trustworthy and adequate for decision making. This raises key scientific and philosophical questions around:
- The assessment of uncertainty in knowledge of the future weather and climate
- The influence of cultural background on how climate information is accommodated; and
- Practical questions of how uncertainty can best be communicated.
Royal Society Science+ Meeting on Time, Environment and Climate
Tim Heaton (Leeds)
The Royal Society support two-day discussion meetings on specific topics combining science with policy, social science, and the arts and humanities. A meeting to discuss Time, Environment and Climate with potential themes of Past, Present and Future would seem an ideal topic for this interdisciplinary approach, bringing together diverse fields of research at the interface of all the national academies. If successful, this could then lead onto a Royal Society policy paper or special edition, and a UKRI big idea to provide a stream of funding.
We want to hear your ideas and make the event interactive. They can be in any field – physical science, social science, arts and humanities. We will set time aside during the day for your ideas to be presented and workshopped. If you’ve got an idea, please bring it along and let us know in advance by emailing Tim Heaton at t.heaton@leeds.ac.uk.
Recorded events
Catch up with previous lectures and seminars from our keynote speakers:
Interdisciplinary Research Network for Time launch event
Watch the keynote presentation from Anne Curtis, National Physical Laboratory, UK.
Watch the keynote presentation from Bren Neale, Emeritus Professor of Life Course and Family Research, University of Leeds.
Watch the keynote presentation from Melanie Giles, University of Manchester.
Watch the keynote presentation from Simon Blockley, Royal Holloway, University of London.