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Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper proposes to think and understand different notions of temporalities with respect to the African Anthropocene, studying the long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper takes times and temporality seriously as the basis for its analysis, building on Wright Mills assertion that ‘history is the shank of social study’ (1959: 143). It proposes to think and understand different notions of temporalities with respect to the African Anthropocene. The paper will focus on the concept of resilience as a way to understand multiple and interconnected crisis in Cote d’Ivoire and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Barbara Adam’s “timescape” perspective (Adam 1998; 2004), where time as a key dimension of people’s lives is understood as complex and multi-dimensional, will provide the conceptual basis for the case studies. This perspective provides a way to understand relationships, interdependencies, and embeddedness and aims to connect process to structures as well as macro and micro perspectives of social change. Our methodological approach to studying the long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices involves looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience. It seeks to trace the resilience of communities as constructed across the overlap between 1) gender, class and the historicity of adverse environmental, economic and socio-political conditions; 2) the cultural repertoires and social practices passed down from generation to generation; and 3) the variety of contextual responses to multiple crises. This approach draws on the broad-based mix of ethnographic, historical and constructivist perspectives on human experiences.