Presented in person and online. Zoom details below.

The Time Politics of Agroforestry Science

Based on ethnographic research at an agroforestry research institute in southwest China, I examine the time politics surrounding scientists’ efforts to design, to research, and to promote agroforestry. In so doing, I bring science into conversation with STS and environmental humanities scholarship on temporality. I draw especially on Michelle Bastian’s emphasis on “the role of time in coordinating across unequal power relations,” and her provocation to “explor[e] the kinds of clocks that could be produced when we ‘coordinate’ ourselves with and through other relationalities within our world.” I argue that in certain respects agroforestry science aspires to do precisely this: It proposes practices that would coordinate with and through the complex temporalities of forest ecosystems. At the same time, however, agroforestry scientists find themselves compelled to coordinate their activities with the temporal sensibilities of the scientific and international development institutions that employ and fund them. Examining the efforts of scientists to coordinate their work with the competing temporalities of forests, evaluation frameworks and business models, I demonstrate how scientists’ (in)capacities for temporal empathy are shaped by institutional life, often in ways that reinforce the dominant political and economic logics and hierarchies that agroforestry science might otherwise challenge.

Speaker: 
Tim is a lecturer in Anthropology in the ANU School of Archeology and Anthropology. His research examines the aspirations of and potentials for environmental experts to bring about more democrat and more livable futures. He recently published his first book, Science Interrupted: Rethinking Research Practice with Bureaucracy, Agroforestry, and Ethnography. 

Zoom: 
https://anu.zoom.us/j/87802807372?pwd=fbu3BD3PcmaIXpt3VU4srkznBENqkG.1
Meeting ID: 878 0280 7372
Password: 277792