Re: [xmca] Researchers looking into non-linear constructions of time

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

A good source for a non-linear view of time is Eliot Mischler's the Double
Arrows of time.
email me directly if you'd like a pdf of it.
-greg

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, enters the final week of
> his object-based history. Taking artefacts from William Shakespeare's time,
> he explores how Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers made sense of the
> unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived. With old
> certainties shifting around them, in a time of political and religious
> unrest and economic expansion, Neil asks what the plays would have meant to
> the public when they were first performed. He uses carefully selected
> objects to explore the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public
> and helped shape the works, and he considers what they can reveal about the
> concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England.
>
> Programme 16 A TIME OF CHANGE, A CHANGE OF TIME - A rare domestic clock
> with an equally rare minute hand and quarter-hour chimes reveals the
> changing relationship Shakespeare's audiences had to time.
>
> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01h6461>
>
> On May 7, 2012, at 1:26 PM, Michelle Zoss wrote:
>
> > Dear XMCA Colleagues,
> >
> > I am working on a project with my colleague, Alisha White, in which we
> are trying to understand the experiences of a  teacher during her second
> year of teaching in which she was diagnosed, treated, and recovered from
> cancer.
> >
> > The issue at hand is this: Time, as we understand it based on her
> discussion of her experiences, was not linear. She often spoke about time
> in a folded or overlapping sense--she spoke about past, present, and future
> all at once on a number of occasions. We speculate that her understanding
> of time was not linear because she positioned her experiences as being
> present to her at the moment of the interview, though the experiences had
> already happened in the past or she was talking about what her experiences
> would be like in the future. Trying to parse out whether she was talking
> about recent past events or future events was something we encountered
> throughout the analysis of several hours of formal and informal interviews
> that were conducted during and just after the school year.
> >
> > The question we would like to pose for consideration of the group is
> this:
> >
> > Where and to whom do we look for discussions and analyses of time in
> people's experiences as possibly non-linear?
> >
> >
> > This question is here, in part, because of work that I did with Peter
> Smagorinsky in analyzing the work of a Native American student and his
> composing practices in an English class (see: http://ijea.org/v8n10/). In
> this study, the student named Peta described how a mapping activity to show
> his life could not be linear because "No way in life is linear." This
> phrase has been rattling around in my own brain since about 2005.
> >
> >
> > For the current study, we think that time was not linear for the teacher
> in our study as well. For her, time was less a function of a clock marking
> a linear progression of hours in a day; rather, time was more a function of
> the relationships she had with students. Time seemed interminably slow when
> her relationships with students were strained and awkward because she was
> recovering from the illness, staying relatively still throughout her
> classes, and not connecting with students on a personal level (there were
> times when she could not remember students' names, let alone if they were
> present in class). In contrast, time seemed more typical and even perhaps
> fast when her relationships with students were closer to her expectations
> for what she expected those relationships to look like. Put simply, time is
> important in this study, but we are struggling with how to theorize how it
> functioned, especially since it seems to be out of synch with the day-to-day
> > pacing of one lesson after another, day after day structure that existed
> in the school. (We published an article last summer about how her teaching
> practices shaped into the kind of teaching she wanted in this article:
> http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2011.01096.x/abstract
> ).
> >
> >
> > I appreciate any thoughts you can share and directions you might be able
> to point out.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Michelle.
> >
> >
> > **** **** **** ****
> >
> >
> > Dr. Michelle Zoss
> > Georgia State University
> > michellezoss@yahoo.com
> > zoss@gsu.edu
> > __________________________________________
> > _____
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
http://ucsd.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca