Abstract:

Temporal privilege is an accustomed way of seeing and interpreting the passage of time, built up over time by the way people live together, what they value, what they look at, and what they do not see. There are many ways to tell stories about time, many ways to live in time, and all of us are always—at every moment—living many different reckonings of time at once. Otherwise put, we live in a plurality of times. But the great majority of us have been trained to think of time as tied to (Newton’s) clock and (Gregory’s) calendar, and we haven’t been encouraged to live the other experiences of time we have, nor consider the differing ways of keeping time that make meaning for other people. That is an ethical failure impacting myriad sites of human interaction. My talk will discuss this problem, offer some case studies, and suggest ways forward for creating collaborative opportunities for temporal revolt, reciprocity, and renewal. Anyone can do it at any time. You don’t have to wait.

Bio: 

Jill Stauffer is professor and director of the concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights at Haverford College, where she runs a restorative practices program and co-directs the Kim Institute for Ethical Inquiry and Leadership. Her book Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, was published by Columbia University Press in 2015. The book was used as a model for the series of dialogues amongst Indigenous nations that lead to the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a cooperative request to the Australian government for indigenous voice in Parliament. She was an original board member of Voice of Witness, an oral history book series and education non-profit illuminating human rights crises by amplifying the voices of those who suffer through them. She has published articles on the work of Levinas, of Nietzsche, and of Arendt, on phenomenologies of listening, practices of hearing that succeed or fail, differences between legal and ethical responsibility, transitional justice and political reconciliation, settler colonialism, indigenous land claims and indigenous refusal/resistance, and how international law judges child soldiers. She also co-edited (with Bettina Bergo) Nietzsche and Levinas: "After the Death of a Certain God" (Columbia UP 2008). Her book Temporal Privilege is due out in November from Columbia UP.