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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research in London and aboard an all-gay cruise ship, this paper introduces synthetic intimacy to examine how closeness is modulated through alternative temporalities and controlled returns to a perceived normalcy under late-stage capitalism.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in London and aboard all-gay cruise ships touring the Mediterranean, this paper introduces the concept of synthetic intimacy to examine how closeness is modulated through alternative temporalities and controlled returns to normalcy. Focusing on practices such as chemsex (chemically enhanced sexual encounters) and all-gay cruise ships, the paper traces how these infrastructures reorganise time to generate suspended, dilated, and compressed encounters that condense affect and intensify intimacy. Despite often being framed by mainstream media and public-health research as pathological or exceptional, these practices function less as ruptures from normative life than as techniques for sustaining it. Hence, synthetic intimacy refers to forms of closeness deliberately manufactured via psychoactive substances, digital interfaces, or commercial tourism that enable emotional rewards without the temporal depth of mutual knowledge or sustained social obligation.

These practices allow participants to dwell in the ambiguity between transgression and reinvestment in the perceived normal life, navigating desire, exhaustion, moral expectations, and the demands of life under late-stage capitalism. In attending to how intimacy is lived across unstable, dilated, and compressed temporal registers, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on chronotopic fragmentation and the challenges of writing intimacy within unsettled temporal conditions.

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This ethnographic exploration of an urban search and rescue team in Istanbul conceptualises “ambiguous seismic time,” where the professional practice of earthquake preparedness reveal symptomatic temporal oscillations between inevitable disastrous futures and unresolved catastrophic memories.

Paper long abstract

Governance of impending emergencies has predominantly been studied through a futurist lens, revolving around concepts such as uncertainty (Button, 2010), risk (Mills, 2019), or anticipatory action (Anderson, 2010). This work highlights the limits of futurity and contributes to the recent literature that foregrounds the analytical and material significance of social memory in governing disasters yet-to-come (Gulum, 2024; Kroepsch et al., 2018). Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a volunteer Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) team in Istanbul, the study investigates how these professionals temporally situate themselves in preparing for the expected Grand Istanbul Earthquake. In an urban context laden with recurrent devastating earthquakes, their professional practice unfolds within a unique temporal terrain, theorized here as ambiguous seismic time; a temporal condition shaped by the tension between uncertain yet inevitable futures and unresolved catastrophic memories. Focusing on the team’s training sessions, this research examines symptomatic temporal ruptures manifesting in the conflictual self-imaginations of USAR professionals as both experienced rescuers and potential victims: Enacting "as-if" scenarios, seeking to make future disasters palpable in the present, yet the epistemic value and reliability of these anticipatory tools are often disrupted by the spectral presence of their experiences in past devastating earthquakes in Turkey. Those ethnographic moments set a broader conversation regarding existing bureaucratic inertia, urban precarity, and Turkey’s prevailing memory regime organized around manufactured amnesia; all delimiting the possibilities for meaningful anticipatory action.

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This paper examines how people of Diyarbakır persist in narrating the Tigris and their own histories through deep temporalities, expansive spatiality, and multiple cosmological registers, against Turkish officials’ symbolic and material efforts to contain the river within the nation-state’s present.

Paper long abstract

Beginning from methodological discomfort with anthropology’s tendency to privilege the present as a site of analysis (Irvine 2020), and uncertainties around the place of the supranatural within secular temporal frameworks (Fernando 2022), this paper reflects on the discipline’s limits through ethnographic encounters with people in Diyarbakır and their relationship with the Tigris. In local narrations, the river enters people’s biographies, nesting everyday life within its longer temporal horizon, wider spatial reach, and varied cosmological orders—crucial for sustaining forms of belonging in Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city and grounded in lived memories and mnemonic traces of a multi-ethnic past preceding the Armenian Genocide. Yet the same river that enables such foldings of time, space, and cosmology is also subject to state efforts to fix it within a singular Turkish-Sunni present through heritage regimes, post-conflict reconstruction, and capitalist development. This paper argues that insisting on a homogeneous ethnographic now risks overlooking how people make sense of the past, inhabit the present, and imagine the future through fragmented narratives—some fractured by violence and irreparable loss, others articulated as political projects that deliberately refuse alignment. Polarisation thus emerges not merely as political antagonism, but as a struggle over which spatio-temporal and cosmological registers are allowed to endure. Attending to the grey zones where such alternatives remain possible, the paper brings together interviews, songs, and literary texts to trace how the river’s deep histories and memories of multi-ethnic coexistence along its shores continue to take shape amid the state’s violent attempts at spatio-temporal and cosmological flattening.

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This paper builds upon fieldwork undertaken on the Isle of Skye, Scotland. It considers the notion of "Skye time" to describe the seemingly incommensurable chronotopes practised by those inhabiting the island. "Skye time" can exist as a temporal resource to navigate the contemporary polycrisis.

Paper long abstract

The Isle of Skye is a spatial repository of polarised imaginaries. It is a zone of escape: from neoliberal productivity; from the pollutant aesthetics of the “urban”; and from both communal fragmentation and oppressive social ties. It is also a meeting point for seemingly incommensurable arts of living. New Age spiritualists meet austere Presbyterians. Nature lovers meet fish farm apologists. Researchers and fieldworkers scan for vestiges of a lost ethnological past formulated as “tradition”. At the heart of this is the sticky phenomenon of “time”. How do chronotopes intersect, jostle, reconstitute one another on this island? Many of my interlocutors spoke of “Skye time”. In one sense, “Skye time” articulates the kind of slowness frequently associated with “island living”, whereby supermarket checkouts are held up by phatic conversations about the weather. But there is also another sense to “Skye time”, something more ineffable, tectonic, cosmic, perhaps. In this paper I consider the multiple intersecting temporalities that emerged over and shaped the course of my doctoral fieldwork. I consider walking rhythms, chronicities, “salvage paradigms” (MacDonald 2011), spiritual conflicts and environmentalist debates to unpack this notion of “Skye time”. I also touch upon the temporal incursions of fatigue, mental illness and chronic uncertainty as they foreclosed certain possibilities and opened up others for me as an anthropologist. Overall, I am interested in how “Skye time” can articulate a temporal politics that both resists the unrelenting drive of capitalist time and reckons with the subjunctive threat of climate catastrophe.

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This paper explores ethnographic work within fractured chronotopes, drawing on fieldwork with Black diasporic communities in Poland. I examine how colonial afterlives and socialist modernities converge, creating temporal misalignments that shape fieldwork and push toward collage as a method.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on what it feels like to work ethnographically within a fractured chronotope, drawing on fieldwork with Black diasporic communities in Poland and archival research into Cold War educational diplomacy. In this setting, two historically distinct temporal regimes—the afterlives of colonialism and the parallel modernity of socialism—converge into a present structured by deferred futures, uneven recognition, and suspended forms of belonging. Rather than treating these temporalities merely as objects of analysis, I take them as the very conditions under which anthropological practice itself unfolds.

Working across state archives organised around Cold War futurity and oral histories shaped by spatio-temporal displacement, I often struggle to sustain a shared sense of time with interlocutors. Conversations move unevenly between colonial, postcolonial, socialist, post-socialist, and neoliberal timescapes—shifting between imagined pasts, anticipated futures, and suspended modernities. Simultaneously, my research becomes fragmented across diverse materials: state archives, interlocutors’ photographs, family albums, newspaper propaganda, and oral histories. These temporal misalignments unsettle not only how the past is narrated, but how field relations are maintained and held together in the present moment.

I describe how these tensions have pushed me toward experimental practices of visual and narrative collage as a methodological response—a way of holding together disjunctive pasts, presents, and futures without forcing them into a single linear account or imposing false coherence. Collage becomes not simply a representational technique but a method for staying with temporal disjunction, sitting with its discomforts, rather than prematurely resolving it into neat analytical frameworks.

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In this paper, I present a reflection on generative autoethnographic research on bipolar chronotope and show how this experience can be used to rethink chronotopic instability as a reservoir for anthropological method and ethics.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, I show how generative autoethnographic research on the lived experience of bipolar affective disorder can be used to explore how anthropology works within fragmented, intimate, and unstable time–space configurations. I do not treat bipolarity as a medicalised oscillation between opposed affective states, but approach it as an embodied condition of fractured and overlapping chronotopes, in which multiple temporalities and spatial orientations coexist, collide, and resist stabilisation. I situate these experiences within broader anthropological debates on polarisation as a dynamic and relational process and show how bipolar experience reflects polarisation as something felt, embodied, and lived in time.

I engage the concept of the chronotope to analyse how bipolar temporalities (marked by acceleration, suspension, excess, and temporal disjunction) intersect with other chronotopes. While institutional chronotopes of psychiatry and academia demand coherence, linear progression, and synchronisation, producing moments in which shared timespace becomes impossible, ethnographic situations may open up provisional spaces of alignment, where fractured temporalities are not resolved but sustained and held in relation.

I argue that chronotopic instability, while often experienced as disorienting or exhausting, can function as a generative reservoir for anthropological method and ethics. Working from within fractured chronotopes demands alternative modes of care, accountability, and future-making, and challenges anthropology’s reliance on a presumptively homogeneous ethnographic present. By staying with instability rather than resolving it, the paper contributes to rethinking how ethnography might be written, lived, and shared in a polarised world.

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Paper short abstract

The aftermath of a polarising event can lie outside of fieldwork’s embodied temporal frame. Polarisation as a process speaks to the inseparability of time-space in the analysis of ethnographic encounters when considering collective possibilities that open & foreclose as polarisation builds.

Paper long abstract

Ethnographic presence at an event that is seen as a “catalyst” for micro-level polarisation is often not documented or analysed in the same way we, as ethnographers, might for moments of large-scale polarisation. Ethnographic practice privileges temporal and spatial presence which allows for "sense making" of social worlds and world views. Yet, for the ethnographer facing precarity, the aftermath of a “catalyst” fieldwork event – throughout which macro-level polarisation can build – lies outside of the in-person, embodied frame of fieldwork.

By considering “catalyst” events alongside further processes of polarisation, I juxtapose an ethnographic encounter with the fluctuating presence/absence of post-fieldwork returns. I take the example of a particularly polarising neighbourhood meeting in 2012, held by a group with which I spent time. Make sensing of the polarising effects of the meeting on both the group and the neighbourhood required a longer temporal frame than ethnographic fieldwork allowed.

Using the post-fieldwork fragmentation of the chronotope as part of the ethnographic method allows for an analysis of polarisation as a process. It incorporates new information – both from fragmented post-encounters and our interlocutors’ reinterpretations – into sense-making of the original ethnographic encounter. As a method, it necessarily couples Peirce’s (1955) framing of how social meaning is made with Bahktin’s (1981) theorisation of chronotopes. As such, it speaks to the inseparability of time and space when considering 'collective possibilities that open and foreclose' throughout processes of polarisation and, thus, during both the ethnographic encounter and subsequent chronotopes of ethnographic analysis and production.