| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, October 21, 2011 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | External Event, Sidney Smith Hall, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, SS2125 |
This paper explores the uneven geographies of time in the context of international development discourse and practice. It argues that the overarching framework within which international development demarcates the boundaries that define and delimit its field of research, policy and intervention is based not only on spatial (first and third worlds) but also temporal (past, present and future) distinctions and furthermore, that these understandings of time and temporality reinforce global hierarchies and inequalities. Perceptions of progress, foundational to a development concerned with transformation, assume universal trajectories of development in which certain people and places are left behind and have to be brought into modernity through development interventions. In this context, this paper is concerned with three issues. First, it demonstrates how different temporalities are ascribed to different places and peoples producing a distinction between the ‘here and now’ of the West that is positioned in relation to, and against the ‘there and then’ of the Third World. Second, it challenges how, given that development offers a normative framework to guide change, the future is predetermined and foreclosed such that the Third World is represented as being of the pre-modern past while the West represents its modern future. Third, it suggests that long-standing ideas and experiences of inequality and deprivation are submerged in policy-driven crises discourses and that the imperative for development policy to speed up and continuously change, revise, reformulate and react, detracts from a poverty that endures. The paper concludes that there is a need in development to address the political-economy of time, take a longer historical view and challenge the power of temporal distancing so that other people in other places can be seen as our contemporaries rather than in, and of, the past.
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