Partners

THE TEMPORALITIES NETWORK

Playing With Deep Time

Playing With Deep Time is a research collaboratory funded by the Oslo School for the Environmental Humanities. It understands game design and gameplay as forms of creative research practice. The project brings together people interested in the exploration of deep time using playful storytelling practices like Nordic LARP and other forms of role-play. The project’s principal investigator is Lifetimes PhD fellow Laura op de Beke.

CoFUTURES

CoFUTURES is an international research group working on contemporary Global Futurisms headquartered at University of Oslo, with its sphere of activities scattered across various communities, research groups and networks around the world. We are involved in research in different sectors including theoretical research, technology research, policy research, artistic research, as well as production or support for transmedial artistic work including fiction, films, and video games.

CoFUTURES is led by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay. The project CoFUTURES: Pathways to Possible Presents has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No.852190). Science Fictionality has received funding from the Norwegian Research Council (NFR) under the FRIPRO-YRT scheme (No. 300931). The projects are hosted by the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.

MYTHOPOL

Project MYTHOPOL seeks to understand the role of hegemonic Hindu storyworlds in the contemporary political field. The sub-projects in MYTHOPOL analyse the political significance of Hindu myths and mythic narratives—those from ancient and medieval texts as well as modern mythologies around charismatic leaders—to Hindu nationalism and the grassroots level movements to deconstruct these storyworlds. The main objective of this project is to produce a cogent theory of how mythological narratives underpin identity in the political field in the contemporary world.

The researcher project is funded by the Norwegian Research Council (project 303378) as part of UTENRIKS. The project is is led by Moumita Sen and based at MF, Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society.

The Lifetimes of Epidemics in Europe and the Middle East

This project sets out to study what we refer to as the “lifetimes of epidemics”, which include the lifetimes and mutation times of microbes, the speed of the transmission of pathogens, and the lifetimes of the human body, as well as the temporal arrangements involved in global health governance, response and control.

We explore the temporal experiences and arrangements at work in biopolitical concepts and practices, in which biological, political, scientific, technological, and social temporalities combine to form “temporal arrangements”, which serve to govern human lives. The long-term planning-horizon of biosecurity and the event-like immediacy of an epidemic are only two of the most striking examples. A lot of work has been done on the history of epidemics, not least on the biography of specific diseases.

The objective of this project is to combine medical history, global history, conceptual history, media history, and literary criticism, in order to create a richer, more complex picture of the epidemic event. Furthermore, event will be used as an analytic term, even a prism, to gain a synchronic transnational view of what is happening in different places, such as Oslo and Istanbul.

The project is led by Einar Wigen at the University of Oslo.