Cassiopea Staudacher

I studied social sciences, specializing in sociology and political science, at Humboldt University in Berlin, New York University and the University of British Columbia. I then worked as a research assistant and later as a research fellow at the Centre for Technology and Society at the Technical University of Berlin, in the Department of Sustainability. During this time and in the course of my M.A. thesis, I explored the discursive and material practices surrounding the problematization of waste in late modernity. My research spans general and cultural sociology, sociological theories, environmental sociology and the sociology of time. I am particularly fascinated by the interplay of materiality, time and sociality that shapes specific ideas and pathways of social transformations.

"Time for Sustainability? Contestations of the Modern Temporal Regime"

The ecological crisis manifests within practices and discourses that might challenge dominant ways in which temporality is constructed. Namely, sustainability calls for preserving the present in such a way that the past will remain present within the future. I argue that actions in the name of sustainability aim to challenge conventional temporalities, practices, and intentions by reconfiguring temporal imaginations and the social relations it constitutes. In doing so they seem to shift their temporal directedness away from the monetization of time and its founding tropes of linearity as well as the basic metaphors of the arrow or time as flow.  To this end, I will examine socio-material practices and discourses around highly problematized ecological materiality and their concomitant sustainability practices. Accordingly, a social diagnostic as well as a theory-generating effect of working with and on such a perspective is intended. Drawing on scholarship rooted in critical time studies, environmental sociology and new materialisms, I will refine the role of plurality, materiality and governmentality for a social theory of time and the extent to which new orders of temporality are being established.