Materials and Time: an Anthology

The purpose of this research blog is to engage humanities and social sciences scholars in a dialogue with material scientists in order to better characterize the hybrid life of materials as natural entities and social or economic agents. We aim to build a collaborative interdisciplinary research network focused on humans’ interactions and interdependencies with materials today and in the long-duration history. We seek to create an anthology that gathers the contributions of scholars from a wide spectrum of research fields who are exploring the temporalities of material, each from their own perpective. The project will explore topics such as :
o lifetimes, lifecycles, use, trajectories, persistence, endurance, ageing
o depletion, peaks, criticality, erosion, alteration, degradation, conservation
o re-use, remaining, recycling, returns, inheritances, rivalries, substitutions
o birthdays and anniversaries, death, decline, rebirth
o genealogies, time travel
o ephemerality, regimes of temporality, mimetism
o ages, epochs
o chronomarkers, signatures, records and measurements