This is a seminar about one of the seemingly most banal and quotidian concepts with which we live, and the most ambiguous, abstract, and precise concepts: time. In the fields of knowledge production from history, anthropology, philosophy, geology, literature, and physics, to name a few are contests over what we know about it, what we can know and what that knowing tells us about the disparate worlds -the imaginary and material, in which we live. Our task in this seminar is more limited: to ask about the social and environmental ecologies in which people experience and talk about time, on the relations of power that are instantiated and maintained through specific fabrications and frames of time. Temporality is a key to the distribution of inequalities. We talk about “losing time,” “wasting time,” “doing time,” “being on time,” “saving time. ” We refer repeatedly to concepts that don’t use the word time but invoke it nonetheless as the frame of concern: anticipation, waiting, gift-giving, expectation, hope, boredom, procrastination, leisure, urgency, are distributed differently in our social and political environments, tethered to social location in particular ways. Do we shape time or does time shape us? We’ll look at what the concept, “temporalities” offers, so pervasive in current social inquiry. People live in different temporalities, multiple temporalities and conflicting ones; the world is divided among those who must adhere to specific protocols of time and timing and those who can disregard them...but sometimes they too may not. This seminar is an exploration of the modalities and the grammars (the required rubrics of tense) that mandate that time is considered in one way and not another. Philosophically, sociologically, and with respect to social history, how time is allocated, distributed, understood is a diagnostic of the worlds we live in and the pressures upon us to adhere to, refuse, and reshape what we see as its requirements and demands. Open to m.a. and ph.d students in any field from TNS and other consortium universities.