Cultivating Temporal Attunement
Zeitliche Abstimmung Kultivieren
Podcast in English: Miriam Holst Jensen on 10th October 2024
Even when our intentions are not to seek out time as a topic of contemplation or in the case of this episode, conflict, it is at the heart of how communities make sense of the changes in their surroundings. Through this fifth episode, Miriam Jensen shares her experiences in becoming familiar with and articulating attunement as a key capacity to reconciling and responding to the environmental changes of the Danish river system of Gudenåen. While she speaks about the research that informed her doctoral dissertation, she is also reporting from on the ground experiences in participatory processes and events. In unpacking the challenges of temporal conflicts that different people face in adapting to climate change and evolving fluvial dynamics, she develops new participatory tools to help people better communicate with each other about the temporal issues at the heart of community conflicts. On this journey, she also responds to questions on the other thinkers who have affected her thinking or continue to inspire her to explore concepts such as critical horology, temporal literacy, and power chronography.
Selbst wenn es nicht unsere Absicht ist, Zeit als Thema der Kontemplation oder, wie in dieser Folge, als Konflikt zu betrachten, steht sie doch im Mittelpunkt dessen, wie Gemeinschaften Veränderungen in ihrer Umgebung verstehen. In dieser fünften Folge berichtet Miriam Jensen von ihren Erfahrungen und davon, wie sie sich mit der Fähigkeit der Einstimmung vertraut gemacht hat. Sie betrachtet diese Fähigkeit als Schlüsselkompetenz für die Bewältigung und Reaktion auf die Umweltveränderungen des dänischen Flusssystems Gudenåen. Sie spricht über die Forschung, die in ihre Doktorarbeit eingeflossen ist, und berichtet auch von ihren praktischen Erfahrungen mit partizipativen Prozessen und Veranstaltungen. Indem sie die Herausforderungen zeitlicher Konflikte aufzeigt, mit denen Menschen bei der Anpassung an den Klimawandel und die sich verändernde Flussdynamik konfrontiert sind, entwickelt sie neue partizipative Instrumente. Diese sollen den Menschen dabei helfen, besser über die zeitlichen Fragen zu kommunizieren, die im Mittelpunkt von Konflikten in Gemeinschaften stehen. Auf dieser Reise beantwortet sie auch Fragen zu anderen Denkern, die ihr Denken beeinflusst haben oder sie weiterhin inspirieren, Konzepte wie kritische Horologie, zeitliche Kompetenz und Machtchronografie zu erforschen.
Disclaimer: the transcript has been altered for legibility.
RAC: Yes, welcome back everyone to our 5th episode, now of time, out at what next. It’s been a little bit of a break, because I’ve had to disappear for the summer for a few months, but I’m really happy to be able to come back and bring a special guest that I’ve been trying to chase down for over a year now. Miriam Holst Jensen, welcome to Time Out. I know that you’ve recently not only finished your dissertation, but you’ve also become a mother. But do tell us a few words about who you are, where you’re from.
MHJ: Yes. So right now, I am a Postdoc at Aalborg University in Denmark, at Techno anthropology. But I finished my PhD in November 2023 at the Department of Sustainability and Planning at Aalborg University, as well. So, I just sort of shifted around a bit in the departments. And then, three weeks later I went straight on maternity leave which you’re saying now. And then, my research interest has been on temporal conflicts and temporal mismatches in a case focused on inter-municipal planning process for the Danish river system of Gudenåen for the last three years now. So, I guess that’s a short bio on me, and then we can get into the details with the questions.
RAC: For sure. Yes, and I know you bring tonnes of experience. Not just your PhD, I mean, you’ve worked professionally as well. In planning at local authorities, regional authorities, too. So, we’re keen to learn about all the experiences that you’ve gathered and how they might relate to time or anything temporal. I guess, maybe to just go and dig into the work that you have done, because that’s kind of what really made me excited to reach out to you was not only, you know, specific publications you had, but your entire PhD, really took a critical but also very alternative view of looking at how time affects people very differently so professional, but also laypersons and natural – so, the not-so-human or the beyond-human. And I loved being able to read about your process and your work because you actually share with us that time was not really what you began with. So, you delved into the work, actually wanting to skirt and sidestep time as an issue. But you then go on to change this. Can you explain how this began? And what was that moment that really made you realize that you had to change your position and kind of embrace the work regarding time and temporality?
MHJ: Yes, sure. I might be a bit long in my answer, so just stop me if it’s too much. But I guess what you’re asking into for me is what I came to term as the cultivation of temporal attunement. So, both myself becoming attuned to questions around time and temporalities, but also making other people attuned to questions of time and temporalities in participatory processes. As you’re saying now, in the beginning of my research, I was very interested in finding sort of new ways to analyze and engage with current conflicts in and settings of participatory planning. And I participated and intervened in this intermunicipal planning process for the river landscape of Gudenåen from 2020 to 2022. So, this planning process was initiated by seven municipalities, sharing the responsibilities of managing the river landscape, and they wanted to manage and counter present and future water extremes mostly related to more extreme episodes of floods – just to sort of put you into the setting of my research. So, in the participatory planning process, a range of different actors participated, such as farmers, nature organizations, archaeologists, boaters, inn owners, planners, politicians, and so on. And they each had their own perspective and understandings of how the river landscape had changed and how that mattered for the present efforts to plan for the future. So, when looking at these different perspectives through my different interviews, and when I participated in workshops, I didn’t really have an eye for sort of the differences in temporal perspectives, but was more attuned to the spatial, as I also write about in my dissertation. And I became very frustrated when I tried to grasp the landscape, because I was trying to grasp it as what I later came to term as a thing instead of these fluctuations, as something that were more fluid. So, with each new interview, or with each new participation in a meeting or a workshop, I became aware that the landscape was very multilayered and was very patchy, because there were all these different perspectives.
But then, when I encountered the language of temporalities and rhythms, I suddenly saw that my frustrations, in a sense, turned into a productive friction, because I could suddenly see that I could capture the landscape and the actors within it from a from a rhythms perspective that really made sense in terms of all of these different temporal perspectives. So, returning to the cultivation of temporal attunement, that was very difficult for me, so I could see how my findings were suddenly filled with this temporal diversity and perspectives, orders, and forms of coordination.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
But this was a very slow process. So, looking through my empirical material, and also looking through the different theories, I had to go sort of beyond the planning canon for a different temporal vocabulary that I could look through and analyze my case through. So, I think that I found that people were not only talking from these diverse perspectives, but also diverse temporal perspectives, and that their life worlds, or I also called it “forms of dwelling” in my dissertation –
…were embedded in and relying on or tuning towards multiple temporalities, and that every person had sort of a distinct temporal framework that they were both embedded in, but that they were also continuously making.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
So that’s sort of where the rhythms perspective comes into play. So, I think that the people were submerged in but also contributing to these multiple rhythms. And there was also their bodily rhythms. So, we can talk about Lefebvre and Régulier maybe later – so in their everyday engagement with the Gudenåen, they were a part of all of these different rhythms that were also changing, but which they were also customizing themselves. So, to return to your questions, I think that when people were meeting in these participatory spaces, people found it very difficult to relate to each other because they – among other, and I think also myself didn’t have this orientation or attunement towards questions related to time and temporality.
When I was interested in these different conflicts between people, these different perspectives, I found that a lot of the miscommunication between people and the inabilities to plan for the future was rooted in this inability to talk about or reflect on matters related to temporality. So, my mission became this cultivation of temporal attunement.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
And how could we make people reflect on and also rethink the temporal relations of which they were a part? So, I think that my interest basically shifted from this broader notion of conflicts to temporal conflicts and mismatches. And we can talk about the distinction between these later, I guess. But yes, and I think this is very much related to what others have also tried to do, such as Barbara Adam talks about cultivating a temporal form of sensitivity, or Huebener talks about temporal literacy. and I think for me it was this engagement with just trying to myself, attuning to questions around temporalities came from this frustration; I wasn’t really able to grasp the landscape but also that I could see that people were miscommunicating, and this was a lot to do with their differences in temporal perspectives.
RAC: Yes, I see a lot clearer now how that shift from conflict was not really a shift. It was actually a sharpening of understanding what types of conflicts were happening.
MHJ: Yeah, yeah.
RAC: And dealing with the natural world and natural systems and natural landscapes where you we as humans, don’t really have a say. If you know, things are going to change as they will – I mean today. It’s the 10th of October, and we have a hurricane coming into southeastern United States that nobody can really stop. You were doing that in Denmark in terms of looking at how flooding was affecting not only the daily lives, but the seasonalities, and also generational gaps and disparities to be able to just see eye to eye and understand which sometimes, you know, humans, we need to be a little bit more humble and just step back and admit that we need that reality check. So it’s great that you were able to find then the language in the works of people such as Barbara Adams, Flaherty as well. You’ve mentioned Lefebvre & and his late wife as well, Régulier. I found the latter particularly also helpful for some of my work in looking at rhythms moving through space, or more synchronized or tied to certain spaces… Could you, perhaps, in relation to some of the other works from some of the others, expand a bit more. So, rhythms was extremely important. But you actually go into detail looking at issues of landscapes versus timescapes, timeworks… In kind of looking at that spectrum, that palette of different types of vocabulary, if you will. Was there maybe one that, you know, became a favorite through your work? I know that there’s some that you had to deal with regards to temporal framing and rhythms. But was that in the end actually, you know, what made you wake up at the start of the day, or was there another one actually, that you found just tickling still, even as we sit here and talk, that you just really want to get to know better and maybe try to explore more?
MHJ: I think, and this is probably, I guess a lot of people involved in time studies will probably give you the same reply, but I guess Barbara Adam is the sort of the huge name in time studies, and I think I would really like to – I read all of her work – but I would like to reread Barbara Adam’s, work, because I think there’s just so much in there that we need to take out and use in terms of both the temporal vocabulary, but also to sort of get a sense of the timescape. So, you talk about the landscape and the timescape. So how can we also make visible all of these different temporal features of the context that we’re a part. And that’s something that I’m thinking a lot about at the moment, and where I’m involved with colleagues about thinking, how can we visualize temporalities? How can we even map the different temporalities in the context that we’re in? So I think in terms of thinking more with the works that I already dived into, I think that’s definitely very inspirational for me to think with the timescape concept in terms of making the temporalities of a certain context visible. And then, I think more broadly, I’ve been very inspired by critical temporal scholarship, and I think it’s very difficult to pinpoint one. But I guess the work of in particular, the work of Michelle Bastian on critical horology. So how can we create different clocks? So how can we think about coordination as not just “We all need to be synchronized to each other within a certain context”, but “how can we make clocks available for that fit the multiple purposes of a of a certain context, and can sort of capture the particular temporalities of a context?” And I think that relates quite well – and Bastian also worked a lot with Larissa Pschetz on temporal design, which has been very inspirational for my own work in terms of identifying these dominant narratives and structures of time, in order to reflect and rethink about dominant narratives of time. So, in my own case, that could be the deadlines set by the EU or the political cycles in the municipalities that would structure the work of farmers, for example. So yeah, and I could talk a lot more about sort of Huebener’s work on temporal literacy or Sharma’s work on power chronography. But I think let’s leave it there, maybe to not overwhelm the audience.
RAC: Yes, this is a bit of a teaser today, and we can always follow up with other discussions.
MHJ: Yeah.
RAC: But I do find it also inspiring that you, – coming as someone who’s worked in planning as well as maybe resource management, to some extent, I would say, because you’re involved more in the river landscape work – are trying to think through what this means to make time and temporal issues clearer and a lot more explicit for how we communicate. And there’s been some work, not just even in in research, I mean, if you look at neurodiversity and various apps that are being developed to help others who think differently, kind of understand time and how they manage their own time through, you know, applications on their cell phones, through colors and different ways of visualizing. I think it does help make the different types of ways that we live amongst each other easier when we can start to empathize beyond that. So, it is definitely not just a lofty but a worthy goal. And for those involved with planning, and who have to work with engagement and participation processes. We work with quite a few different perspectives all the time and must manage that. So, we’ll be very curious to see how you guys’ progress with that. One particular point, I guess, that came to the fore in in my experience of reading your dissertation as well, was this focus on trying to understand; so, you had mentioned dwelling, how people kind of live in their spaces, and how that changes over time and you very poignantly highlight how that’s something that could be tied to the persons but also tied to generations of persons throughout a family. And then you also go through how there’s a multi-species understanding of temporalities as well. So, looking beyond kind of this humanist – not that humans are bad, but we’re not, you know, the core to everything – beyond that kind of human centric anthropocentric view of how we should understand time and how it’s experienced. Could you maybe speak to that a little bit, and how that relates to social infrastructures of time, and why that could be important for us?
MHJ: I think I will approach the question from first in my own case and then give some broader reflections on the matter. So, I think, in my attempt to develop an approach for getting people to sort of reflect on and rethink time and generally talk about time at all in these participatory processes, I try to develop an approach called a temporal deliberation approach – or, I did develop an approach, sorry, together with my co-author, Michelle Bastian an article hopefully coming out soon. And that approach is based on a series of different interventions or workshops that Michelle and I both did. And I think what was clear in my own case was that the different tools that I developed for drawing out time – I made this rhythmical calendar, for example, where people were asked to mark and draw on an annual wheel or a seasonal round, and they were asked different questions, such as:
When do relevant seasons end and begin for you, and what marks them? And here they’re also asked by prompts to think about not just dates, but also natural markers, such as the weather and plants and animals, and so on. And then also to think about if there were any actors that would define or mark their different seasonalities. And what was interesting for me here was that many participants in my workshops marked more-than-human mismatches in timing. And that could be, for example, a seasonal attack from a swan that was attuning to the weather and temperature, and then the kayaker, attuning more to Gregorian calendar time – which I think in itself is sort of an excellent example of this mismatch between multi-species temporalities attuning in a different way.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
And then we have all these social infrastructures of time such as the Kayaker adhering by Gregorian calendar time.
It could also be the farmer sort of feeling stuck in these temporal structures of the EU or the municipalities – the political cycles of the municipalities – where many farmers, in my own case, expressed this inability to attune and adapt to the natural environment of which they were a part, and they talked a lot about this “date tyranny”. They wanted to get past the date tyranny that the municipalities were enforcing. And I think that that this, of course, leads to a lot of frustration, as people in my own case, living with and by the river, felt unable to follow these changes in the river’s rhythms.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
And I think that turning our attention towards these temporal structures and multi-species times, may be particularly useful, and also a different lens, I guess, into questions related to climate adaptation. So, if we think about adaptation from a temporal point of view, we can also open up for more just adaptation processes in the sense that these are often filled with temporal forms of injustice and discrimination as the examples that I just came with before. And I think this is, of course, related to the work of Larissa Pschetz and Bastian that I just mentioned, before, which I’ve been very inspired by. But
It’s very significant, because a lot of actors use plants and animals as temporal indicators for knowing when the right time to act is. So, we need to rethink completely these temporal frameworks, and I think a suitable way to do so could be to look at: How do different actors use, for example, plants and animals as indicators for knowing when to act?
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
And how can we engage in new frameworks for timely action, where we can also rethink these social infrastructures of time, which I think can be deeply problematic if you’re placed in an environment with contextual temporalities that you want to follow. So, I think that’s the quick and dirty reply to your question.
RAC: Yeah. And there’s actually a very, very important message behind that which we’re really only just scratching the surface of here. And you’ve done that quite well through your work. I guess I’m going to put you on the spot with maybe just another question to look at the challenges associated with that. So, the multi-species temporalities – you’re helping with that by giving us the perspectives, highlighting how they come into conflict, giving us the different types of words and terminology we need. The social infrastructures component, however, is difficult. I’m just kind of reflecting on the go here, I mean, last night I was at a city council meeting here with students and if you think about how our social infrastructures are so regimented. But they’re so deeply regimented that you know most of the time we don’t even realize how structured our days and our nights are. You know, tied to the work schedules, tied to the schedules of when businesses are open, scheduled to how different types of structures or other services, like lights, or whatever in the city, come on to mark the day or go off to mark the evening… Do you think that in terms of trying to shift or become more responsive through that that kind of temporal attunement, as you would call it of the social infrastructures. Do you think that that work is feasible? Is it happening? Where do you see it happening, and how does it have to happen?
MHJ: My work has been focused on cultivating temporal attunement, right? And I think that’s for me is only a part of the solution if we can, if we can call it that. So, I’m not saying that the cultivation of temporal attunement, or getting people accustomed to matters related to time is the only way. I think we need to relate it to the broader question of how we can change planning practices, and I think in my PhD dissertation, that’s what I’m not touching too much. That’s sort of the next step, I think, from the work that I did. And I think you’re pointing to something that’s difficult. So how can we also –
in my own case, for example, it was very difficult to get politicians to participate in many of these workshops, and even getting people interested in matters of time and temporalities in itself can be very difficult. It’s a huge challenge, but I think that it’s a challenge that we need to take, because when we do get people accustomed to these questions of time and temporalities and we make people reflect on temporal power structures, for example, I think that it can make a difference.
Miriam Holst Jensen 10/2024
An example from my own case is how I shared some of my findings on time and temporalities with a municipal planner, and he suddenly realized: oh, I could plan my entire year completely, differently, so I could follow the river’s rhythm in a completely different way that I do now. So, I encounter a lot of temporal stress in this season, and then I could, in the other season, maybe I could have a lot of temporal empathy for the farmers, because now I understand their situation and their different time frames in a better sense. So, I think that it does make a difference. But I also think that it needs to relate to the broader questions of how do we change these practices? And I think my work does not dive enough into that. And I think we need to – that’s sort of the next step. And thinking about if it’s feasible: it depends, I guess, at what point are we at now? And at my case is sort of a case of municipal planning, right, from a municipal point of view. And that’s, I guess, the only context that I can answer from where I am at the moment, and I think from a municipal point of view, it is possible. But there are also a lot of problems, both in terms of getting people involved in questions, getting them attuned to questions around time and temporalities and the importance of it, and then also sort of linking it to the national agendas that we see. So, in Denmark we have a lot of issues now with national reforms of regions, for example. So how do we connect it to both a regional and a national level as well. And that’s where the difficulties begin, I think.
RAC: Yeah, much work to be done. But we are making steps in that direction. And yeah, as I mentioned, I was putting you on the spot. But I do think that what you’re doing is a very important step in that direction, pointing out that there are those injustices and inequities associated with how we don’t empathize or understand the temporal issues and struggles and conflicts that are not always quite visible at the surface. And so, thank you so much for doing that and sharing your work with us today. Maybe just as one thought because your work does remind me of initiatives that are happening. There is also, I think, outside of trying to bridge at an EU-level, I guess, or maybe even global time-use interests, there are lobbyist groups or networks trying to raise awareness about that. So, the time use initiative is one that comes to mind looking at time poverty. Maybe that’s perhaps a way for us to think a little bit more deeply about time equity and just approaches to understanding time. And yeah… thank you again for reminding us about that.
MHJ: Yes, thank you for including me in your podcast.
Miriam Holst Jensen is a researcher at the Aarhus Municipality in Denmark where she is helping run and implement a national climate project ‘LIFE ACT’ that is comprised of 30+ partners. Up until recently, she was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Culture and Learning at Aalborg University. Her research interests revolve around time, participatory processes, and river landscapes. Her dissertation centered on temporal conflicts, where she developed the notion of ‘Cultivating Temporal Attunement’ as a means of engaging with others in dialogues on the multiple and conflicting temporalities of participatory planning processes. She remains dedicated to her temporal interests and efforts as an independent scholar next to her current project role at the municipal level.