Continues the discussion of mental capacity with expansion of the debates brought by the romantic perspective. Presents the political demand for radical equality coming from left romanticism with its wild ‘abolitionist’ agenda on the one hand, and a seeding of some new social approaches to capacity assessment on the other. A deeper inquiry into mental capacity and mood disorder using romantic ideas of temporality is presented as additional stimulus for the evolution of mental capacity. Some characteristics of mental capacity fitting it to a ‘superconcept’ are explained, which may guide future interdisciplinary research and teaching.

In 2000, when the Austrian right-wing politician Jorg Haider became part of a national governing coalition, there was trans-European outrange. In 2022 when Giorgia Meloni became prime minister of Italy her neofascist roots were barely mentioned. This contribution asks: What happened in Europe between 2000 and 2022 that led to the “normalization” of right nationalist politics in country after country? This chapter analyzes the trajectory of right politics in Europe as it seeks to identify continuities, commonalities, and contingent events that pushed the right forward. Temporality is the chapter’s organizing principle. The attenuation of thick security is the red thread that runs through it. Explaining the ascendance of the populist nationalist right in terms of a security crisis is a more robust way of thinking of current events than explanations that focus on conceptions of cultural identity or purely economistic explanations . The chapter proceeds in four stages: the longue durée of the European nationalist right; the stabilization period that succeeded the crises of 2015; the effect of the Covid surprise and, lastly, the need for a reinvention of security. Secondary sources, election data, and political speech provide the evidence for the argument advanced.

This chapter approaches Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde from the viewpoint of its temporal dramaturgy. It highlights the opera’s specificity by interpreting it as a tragedy of hearing: a tragedy in which the main characters, Tristan and Isolde, stuck in their melancholy, are bound to the discursive and plot-oriented forms of musical-operatic time, while the redemption they desire – aesthetically presented by Wagner through acoustic means – points musically beyond the opera’s temporal structures. These connections can be traced on the structural level and that of musical dramaturgy and musical form but also on the level of the characters’ psychology.

Rather than occasions for law’s standstill in face of a political decision, emergencies are opportunities for legal, institutional and normative mobilization. The entry lays out the field’s basic areas of concern: the theoretical problem of containment of threats within a particular legal and political order, and the practical problems of definitions, authorizations, jurisdiction and temporality. If indeed the time frames of emergency are long and flexible, multiple and overlapping rather than “exceptional”, then law in emergencies is a constantly shifting space of opportunity in which normatively charged political projects can be manifested. To design legal and constitutional mechanisms that will better respond to threats, we should shift away from theories that perpetuate a static dichotomy between “norm” and “exception”, and study emergency as a dynamic field of legal and normative mobilization.

Chapter 5 focuses on the different temporalities that are interwoven in the station, feeding into everyday experiences and informing patterns of action. In Accra’s station, just as in most bus stations in Ghana, departures do not follow designated scripts dictated by clock time; instead, they are collectively timed by the inflow of passengers. These inflows follow different rhythmic temporalities co-composed in Accra and in the destinations served by the station. By detailing the daily work activities of an inexperienced and an experienced station worker, it teases out different levels of perceptual attunement to movement and rhythm taking shape hundreds of kilometres away. It argues that the tacit dimension of temporal and kinaesthetic enskilment highlights important qualities needed to make hustle successful, which essentially requires the ability to ‘read’ the different rhythms of eruptive situations and to align and time one’s actions accordingly.

Chapter 6 examines the social and economic implications of the station’s unscheduled departures by exploring the practices and experiences of waiting at the station, which, in a major public transport hub, is a quintessential property of social action. Building on a ‘slow’ ethnographic elaboration of the minutiae of loading a bus (which took six and a half hours), it presents the positions of three groups of actors in relation to the temporalities of waiting at the station: the passengers, the drivers, and the station workers responsible for organising departures. A focus on the dimensions of ‘empty time’ contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the station hustle, one that goes beyond its seemingly perpetual busyness and ceaseless activity, and that facilitates a subtle analysis of the social and economic relations in contexts of contingent and involuting organisations of labour and time.

Cultural confidence, moral superiority, and metropolitan elitism: these characteristics of the 1870s are exemplified by Harley Granville-Barker’s edited collection of essays, The Eighteen-Seventies (1929), which offers a nostalgic, aristocratic, Oxbridge, and high-culture account of this decade. But this present collection, in the spirit of the series to which it belongs, frames the 1870s as a decade in transition, and seeks to unsettle its conventional associations while acknowledging their force and legacy. Indeed, writers of the 1870s were especially adept at questioning their current temporal moment, often betraying an overdetermined sense of their place in time, and even of temporality itself.

This chapter argues that the 1870s witnessed the final hegemony of a cause-and-effect form of thick temporality that arguably still dominates our lives. It asks if digital tools open up alternative ways of thinking about chronology, our experience of time, and the possibility of action. The chapter examines two digital projects that change how we approach the 1870s: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History or BRANCH at branchcollective.org, and Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education or COVE at covecollective.org.

This chapter bridges environmental humanities and Black humanities by examining a figure largely, if curiously, excluded from the “ecocritical” canon: Charles Chesnutt, the first African American writer of commercially successful fiction. Reading literary environmentalism beyond the lenses of Romanticism or transcendentalism, Forbes finds in Chesnutt’s late nineteenth-century conjure tales a richly imagined Black environmental heritage that connected race and nature. Chesnutt’s short fiction featuring metamorphoses of humans into plants and animals represents a key node in an alternate, and nonlinear, Black environmentalist timeline. In contrast to environmentalisms that pit nature’s interests against humans’, the insights we see at flashpoints across this tradition, and crucially in Chesnutt’s conjure tales, belie narratives of human/nature separation that underpin most “white” environmentalisms. Moreover, his marshaling of racialized nonhuman agencies also helps us address persistent difficulties associated with new materialist theorizing. Fusing human/plant/animal agencies to frameworks of care and nurturance, characters in Chesnutt’s conjure tales weaponize “waste” against enslavement’s inhuman valuation systems.

Nina Granqvist and Ari Kuismin focus on temporality in strategy as practice research. They offer an overview of prior research on time-related topics and then move on to develop an understanding of the ways in which strategy as practice scholars can approach temporality. This can involve process approaches that concentrate on temporally situated strategic activity over time, practice-based approaches that focus on time as a key element in the way strategy is worked on, and narrative approaches that deal with how pasts and futures are discursively constructed. They conclude with an agenda for future research on the role of temporality in strategizing.

This introduction sets out the aims and approach of the book. Following an introduction to the Norwegian post-war reckoning and a review of the existing literature on the topic, it argues that only an analysis of the full time span of the trials can uncover their complex dynamics and the changing positions of their key actors over time. The introduction then sets out the analytical framework of the book, which is to explore the – at times competing – legal and political rationales of the trials in face of a rapidly changing political and social climate.

This chapter deals with the methodological procedures of a CA study by tracking the development of a collection of instances of a multimodal practice and its variants. We describe the development of a study of the use of the German formats darf/kann ich…? (‘may/can I…?’; Deppermann & Gubina, 2021). Requesters use this format to ask if they may/can perform some embodied action while already starting or even fully performing it before the requestee’s confirmation. We first describe the process of sampling candidate cases to create a collection allowing us to identify a certain practice. Second, we describe how we analyzed (i) the time course of embodied action and its relationship to participants’ talk, (ii) the relationship the linguistic turn format, the sequential position and the multimodal context of the turn, and (iii) the relationship between situated action formation, linguistic design, action types, and interactional properties of a practice. Finally, we stress the importance of applying various strategies of comparative analysis and analytic induction to a larger dataset. We also discuss attending to the multimodal formation of social action on the basis of video data and multimodal transcripts is crucial for our understanding and analysis of face-to-face interaction.

This chapter explores three key ways that epic has expressed a sense of temporality. The first is foundational: epic uses genealogy to express the structure of things, through aetiologies and causations and the preserving function of memory. Goldhill shows how this sense of foundational time can be enacted through cosmology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, through social structures, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and on a political plain, as in Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia. The second is narratological and thematic: epics make time a subject of their narrative, through the centralisation of delay within the heroic mission (as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid), and even through making time itself a character, as Nonnus does in his Dionysiaca. The third is poetic: how epic marks its awareness of its place in tradition. As shown most strikingly by works like Quintus’ Posthomerica and Eudocia’s Martyrdom of St Cyprian, epic inhabits its own moment whilst forging connections with previous epics and looking ahead to posterity. Using these three vectors, Goldhill explores the ancient epic tradition on a broad scale in a way that grounds the next two chapters in this section.

This chapter examines the temporal texturing of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. Unlike the Aeneid, the Argonautica is not tied to a specific political project, but it uses epic and specifically Homeric narrative models more allusively to shape its reader’s experience of the world. Focusing on Orpheus’ cosmogonic song, the ecphrasis of the Acherousian headland, and then the consequences of desire as felt by Medea, Phillips draws attention to the small moments of temporal shaping within the Argonautica – how time is experienced by the characters and the readers on the level of the individual line, phrase and even word – which contain the many perspectives offered by Apollonius on navigating the burden of living as a subject of history.