In the framework of the EUI Widening Europe Programme, this conference explores local and global temporalities, with a specific focus on Eastern Europe.
In recent years, ‘time’ has emerged as a key analytical category (Koselleck, 2004), a development often labelled as the ‘temporal turn’ in history and the social sciences. Recent scholarship has largely converged around three main themes: the politicisation of time (Clark, 2019), the dynamics of large-scale temporal regimes across societies and cultures (Hartog, 2015), and the multiple scales and dimensions through which historical change unfolds (Braudel, 1984). Researchers focusing on Eastern Europe have actively participated in this shift, using ‘time’ as a lens to re-evaluate the region’s historical specificities, while simultaneously seeking to overcome reductive binaries, such as that between East and West (Colla and Gjuricová, 2023; Deschepper et al., 2024; Rindzeviciute, 2023). While these studies have provided valuable insights, they have not yet fully accounted for how global temporal regimes and alternative structures of time in their interaction with local conceptions have shaped Eastern Europe’s political, cultural, and economic trajectories (Brauner, 2024; Edelstein et al., 2020). Building on these insights, this workshop seeks to examine the intersections of local and global temporalities and their varying manifestation in Eastern Europe. It is particularly interested in how temporal frameworks have been constructed, operationalised, and contested to legitimise political authority, reshape collective memory, and mediate the region’s relationship to global dynamics, either by reinforcing national boundaries or creating new forms of transnational connection, whether despite or because of Eastern Europe’s ongoing engagement with the wider world.
This event is funded by the EUI Widening Europe Programme. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
'Photo credit: Fortepan / Chuckyeager tumblr'