Birgit Bräuchler and Nina Grønlykke Mollerup
Media have always been closely entangled with time. Be it the introduction of the letterpress, television or the internet, they all impact time – both in the sense of the speed with which information or content is spread, and in how people experience time through the creation of multiple temporalities. Media’s entanglement with time has intensified and turned more complex through multimedia platforms and digital technology. Understanding this entanglement is crucial in a time when digital media have become integral parts of our lifeworlds and time and attention have become precious resources – for nation states, corporate businesses and individuals. Media can upset, accelerate and slow down time; they can allow immediate immersion in ongoing dynamics, but also experientially bring us beyond the time and space of the present through engagement with events from the past, new ways of envisioning or creating the future, and the creation of imaginary times and places.
Media can shape our perceptions of time, but the relationship is reciprocal in the sense that media exist in time, but time also exists in media (Munn 1992). Media shape temporalities, but time and temporalities also shape the way we design, use and manipulate media. Keightley (2013: 68) argues that ‘time is produced through the interaction between media and social contexts of consumption, time can be produced through the interaction of multiple media in any given milieu, and that time can be experienced through the negotiation between the various temporal logics of technologies and symbolic content’. Importantly, as Keightley notes, time cannot be solely defined by technologies’ temporal logics, as their time-related features must be interpreted and integrated into lived experience (ibid.). This points at the importance of cultural, political and historical contexts as to how we perceive and conceptualise our experience of time (Adam 1994: 503).
The time-space compression that Doreen Massey (e.g. 1994) argues for in discussion of David Harvey’s (1989) work on the condition of postmodernity has become increasingly relevant as media devices become increasingly locative and connected. Already in the early 1990s, Munn (1992: 94) emphasised that ‘in a lived world, spatial and temporal dimensions cannot be disentangled, and the two commingle in various ways’. However, while media is increasingly studied from the perspective of time, much research to date has focused on the increasing mobility and connection of media from the perspective of place. Our edited volume seeks to further develop the growing attention to time and media. We acknowledge that ‘accelerated and intensified contact which is a defining characteristic of globalisation leads to tensions, contradictions, conflict and changed opportunities in ways that affect identity, the environment and the economy’ (Eriksen 2016a: 1). However, in this volume, we shed light on the complexity of the media-time nexus and go beyond a focus on what Eriksen calls the ‘overheating effects’ of overlapping, interlocking global crises of environment, economy and identity, to which digital media contribute.
This volume theorises the entanglement between media and time. It aims to explore how different forms of media disrupt, accelerate and decelerate time, how media influence the temporalities of its users and audiences and the social and cultural implications of this. Further, the volume explores how media facilitate remembering, reconstructing and manipulating the past, and how they open up space for envisioning and enabling futures. Theorising Media and Time brings together leading international and early career media scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and communication and media studies. The unique contribution of our chapters is that they hone in on people’s actual media use through ethnographic research and theorise the relationship between media and time from these engaged and very diverse perspectives.
In this volume we draw on a huge body of work on the anthropology of time, the anthropology of media and related fields of study. Specifically, we aim to contribute to the anthropology of time – from Durkheim (1912) to Gell (1992), Munn (1992) and Fabian (2002 [1983]), and to more recent advances such as the anthropology of future (Bryant and Knight 2019) and crisis (Bandak 2023; Vigh 2008, 2022). None of the mentioned works explicitly engages with media. Due to the close entanglement between media and time, we want to bring the scholarly discourse on time into conversation with another tradition, the anthropology of media – including more general introductions (e.g. Askew and Wilk 2002; Costa et al. 2023; Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod and Larkin 2002), works covering certain fields within media anthropology such as practice theory (Bräuchler and Postill 2010) and conflict (Budka and Bräuchler 2020), to works with an explicit focus on the digital (e.g. Miller et al. 2016; Pertierra 2018; Pink et al. 2016). We are particularly interested in how media are part of the users’ everyday lived experiences (Vokes and Pype 2018) and how such embeddedness leads to the emerging co-constitution of media and temporalities. In our contributions, the digital attracts specific attention as digital media have taken over or been integrated with other media in the empirical realities the chapters focus on. Yet, our contributors analyse the digital as part of broader hybrid media landscapes (Chadwick 2013).
Whereas our starting point is an anthropological grounding, we are well aware of the interdisciplinary character of our endeavour, also very much reflected in the interdisciplinary character of our bibliography. Anthropology has been key in examining and theorising temporalities, yet cross-fertilisation with related disciplines from the social sciences and humanities continues to play important roles in conceptual analyses and theory formation. Within this volume, we are fortunate to be able to build on excellent studies already conducted on the media-time nexus, in particular Emily Keightley’s and Rob Kitchin’s work. These studies, however, have a strong focus on the so-called West/Global North (e.g. Keightley 2012b; Kitchin 2023: 25). To our knowledge, there is no work specifically looking into the various interconnections of time and temporality with different kinds of digital media, hybrid media and across different regional and thematic cases. We thus aim to add new perspectives through regional diversity, attention to a broad range of media and media practices, grounded ethnographic approaches, as well as attention to the way global inequalities play out, for instance through migration or violent conflicts. In this volume we not only look into the acceleration of time through the immediacy of digital media or the increasing digital media saturation of our daily lives, but also at other dimensions of the media-time nexus such as the role of algorithms and calendars, memories and archives, identity and community, crisis and visions of the past, present and future. We acknowledge and explore the complexity and diversity of temporal connotations of contemporary media usage and deploy case studies from different parts of our world, including Latin America, Northern America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Our goal is to use a specific moment in history to reflect on both the particular affordances of the media of the time – for example, to fundamentally change the temporal organisation of work (as we see in the chapters by Gudrun Rudningen and Simiran Lalvani) – and historical developments, enabled by the contributors’ long-term engagement with their fields of study (as we see in the chapters by Philipp Budka, Cathrine Bublatzky and Ingrid Kummels).
One important aspect of the temporal media dynamics we are looking at in this volume is the question of power that is deeply ingrained in the hierarchisation of temporalities and the way media are set up, used, manipulated and part of local and global economies and politics. To mention but a few examples, this reaches from those excluded from what Castells (2010 [1996]) has coined the ‘network society’; to hierarchising acts of labour in and of time ‘through which conflictual social rhythms … are mediated’ (Bear 2014: 20); to how temporalities produced by digital technologies affect different groups of people, or individuals from the same group differently, which can potentially ‘produce temporal power, and maintain temporal inequalities and slow violence’ (Kitchin 2023: 196). Kirtsoglou and Simpson (2020a: 3) have coined the notion of chronocracy; that is, ‘the discursive and practical ways in which temporal regimes are used in order to deny coevalness and thereby create deeply asymmetrical relationships of exclusion and domination either between humans (in diverse contexts) or between humans and other organisms and our ecologies’. Our focus is on how temporalities are negotiated and chronocracy is generated and challenged in a rapidly changing and constantly emerging digital media landscape.
In sum, this volume aims to contribute to innovative theorisations of media in relation to time and temporality and thus offer a framework to inspire and guide comparative future research. In a time of speeding up and spreading out, we hope to help slow down time and allow room for pensiveness about how media works on time and how time works on media.
In this introductory chapter, we start with some scholarly reflections on time. In the main part of the chapter, we reflect on (digital) media and time and introduce the volume’s chapters on the go. We will first explore the notion of multiple temporalities and time regimes in the digital age, before looking into acceleration, deceleration and presentism as some of the defining criteria for these dynamics. We then explore the fields of conflict, witnessing and crisis, memory and archives, and algorithms. Finally, we elaborate on the interconnection of power, digital media and time, before closing with some concluding reflections and introducing the book structure.
Anthropology, along with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, has always had a complicated relationship with time (Ringel 2016). Some authors have provided comprehensive reviews of the study of time more generally (see in particular Kitchin 2023), looked at time and media in historical perspectives (Zielinski 2006), the effects of industrialisation and modernisation on working people’s time perception and the commodification of time (Thompson 1967), or the global and ongoing effects of the adoption of clock time (Postill 2002). There is substantive anthropological literature on how media facilitate engagement with the past (e.g. Basu 2008; Crone and Mollerup 2024; Salamandra 2019), processes of remembering (e.g. Argenti and Schramm 2010; Banks and Vokes 2010) and envisioning the future (e.g. Bandak 2024, Bryant and Knight 2019), all highlighting different dimensions of time and temporality and their entanglements with media. Others have reflected on how conceptualisations of time contribute to the othering of people that anthropologists are working with in the field (Fabian 2002 [1983]) or on local imaginaries of time as well as the (multi-)temporality of the relationship between fieldworker and the field (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2013). In this section, we focus on those aspects of the study of time that we consider to be specifically relevant for our analysis in this introduction and the volume more generally: temporality, everyday relationality and power.
Conceptually, with inspiration from the ancient Greeks, we can differentiate between chronos which describes time as measure – the quantity of duration of time – and kairos, which points to the qualitative character of time and allows a focus on a certain time in relation to other times, enabling the idea of ‘the right time’ (in contrast to ‘any time’) (Smith 1986). Building on this, we can think of social time (a collaborative organising of time) and phenomenological time (how individuals experience time) (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020b: 2). We can use or kill, save or waste, give or steal time (Christensen and Røpke 2010; Kitchin 2023: 5). We can thus also think of social and phenomenological time through the concept of temporality in the sense of the way time is perceived and organised. In Digital Timescapes: Technology, Temporality and Society Rob Kitchin (2023: 4) argues that,
temporality denotes the diverse set of temporal relations, processes and forms that are enacted and experienced through individual and collective action. Temporalities are embodied, emplaced, materialized and experiential … they are time performed through individual agency, entangled with the temporalities of others, and structured through institutional arrangements and mediating technologies and systems … Temporalities are experienced as a complex entangling of past, present and future, rather than as time’s arrow … temporality is plural and heterogeneous.
People everywhere are usually entangled in many different but ‘intersecting temporal relations that shape the perception and experience of time’, including temporalities organised around the family, a community or work, around biological cycles, chronometric or calendrical units, fiscal, historical or economic cycles and others (Kitchin 2023: 5). They constantly (re)negotiate complex and ever-changing temporal landscapes (ibid.: 8) that involve
physical processes and social conventions, … abstract relations of mathematics and … concrete relations between people. We measure it in units of clock time, by celestial motion, with the aid of recurrent events, and through changes in our bodies. We utilize it as a medium of exchange for goods and services, or as a means of payment. We use it as a resource of nature, of society, of people, and of institutions, each in turn constituting a boundary within which choices and selections for action have to be made.
(Adam 1994: 508)
To grasp that processual character, Munn (1992: 116) introduced the notion of ‘“temporalization” that views time as a symbolic process continually being produced in everyday practices’. This implies that individuals can shape how temporalities are generated, but often it is a collective endeavour that is embedded in specific social contexts and often technologically mediated (Kitchin 2023: 9, 11).
Although context is considered important in how temporalities take shape, both Adam (1994) and Gell (1992), two influential scholars in the anthropology of time, warn of contributing to ‘othering’ one’s research subject by assigning them to a different time order – a denial of coevalness that scholars like Fabian and Wolf had already raised earlier (Fabian 2002 [1983]; Wolf 1997 [1982]). As Gell (1992: 315), speaking from the position of a British anthropologist, argued, ‘there is no fairyland where people experience time in a way that is markedly unlike the way in which we do ourselves, where there is no past, present and future, where time stands still, or chases its own tail, or swings back and forth like a pendulum’. For Gell (ibid.), ‘time-anthropology … consists of the development of means of representing, dispassionately and critically, the manifold ways in which time becomes salient in human affairs’. Context is important here, but it is manifold, including culture, gender, class, political affiliation and others, and cannot be reduced to only one.
Such ‘complex temporalities of contextual being, becoming and dwelling’ has led Adam (1998: 10) to develop the notion of timescapes to reflect on the close entanglement of time, space and context. Abstract and quantified calendar and clock time thus form ‘only one aspect of the complex of meanings associated with Western time’ (Adam 1994: 509; emphasis in the original). In this volume we explore precisely these manifold temporalities and how they are entangled in media usage as specified later in this chapter, not guided by the alleged divide between a so-called West and non-West, or Global North and South, but by specific combinations of contextual factors. Examples are the need for work and the desire for flexibility in Simiran Lalvani’s chapter on food delivery workers in India or the need to combine different temporal logics in Ingrid Kummels’ chapter on a Mexican Indigenous diaspora living under the hegemonic conditions of a tightened US border regime. It is these contextual factors that also shape the relational character of time and power dynamics involved in diverging temporalities.
Adam (1994) emphasises how the experience of time is integral to human existence and everyday life, which leads us to another important dimension of time: relationality. Relationality implies that time is no essential given, but emerges in and through everyday social relations. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim stipulated that time and temporality are not individualistic. Perceptions of time are shaped collectively, and temporality and temporal ordering emerge through social life, reflecting specific social structures, where ‘a calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activity’ (Durkheim 1995 [1912]: 10). It is calendrical events such as rituals and cycles that ‘establish time as an entity which is fundamentally social and relational in character’ (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020a: 3), no matter whether it is perceived to be a linear flow, repetitive or a combination of both (Jedrej 2010: 691).
However, despite what Durkheim’s notion of time as a social fact might suggest, temporality emerges through people’s practices (Bourdieu 1977), including the strategic manipulation of time and the compliance with social norms of time. Just as time and temporality more generally are contingent, produced, relational and multiple, so are (our imaginaries of) past, present and future as well as memory (Kitchin 2023: 16). This is addressed in Ali Atef’s chapter on the difficult work of merging ideas, technological possibilities and image collections into publicly accessible small-scale archives in Egypt that connect to both the past and the future. Likewise, in Gudrun Rudningen’s chapter, a particular professional logic in a digitalised Norwegian newsroom collapses the past and the present into a never-ending now.
Just as temporalities are plural and heterogeneous, conflicts are inevitable, and power plays important roles in the hierarchisation of temporalities. Kirtsoglou and Simpson (2020a: 3) contend that ‘temporalities … are not merely multiple and parallel … but … are imbricated in the contemporary world in ways that are hegemonic and incongruent’. As Kitchin (2023: 15) put it, ‘lived time is gendered, classed and racialized’. Ordering time or having control over time is tantamount to introducing or reinforcing power hierarchies. Kirtsoglou and Simpson (2020a: 3) have here introduced the analytically helpful notion of chronocracy as introduced earlier.
There are various ways in which such temporal hegemony can play out in social relations and norms, but an important factor is when certain interpretations of time get institutionalised or encoded in technical systems (Kitchin 2023: 14). The introduction of calendar and clock time (Postill 2002) or algorithmic temporalities generated by social media or time management apps (Wajcman 2019) are good examples. Archives are no neutral technical means to store certain artefacts either, but have clear political agendas, depending on who is maintaining and who is using them (see e.g. Bandak, Crone and Mollerup 2024; Saber and Rahman al-Jaloud 2024; Tarnowski 2024) (see also chapters by Atef, Budka, Bublatzky, this volume). However, temporal powers can also be resisted, manipulated, ignored, subverted or undermined, and we will provide examples here and in our chapters of how people develop and employ ‘their own time tactics to challenge temporal relations and time rules’ (Kitchin 2023: 14), ‘anti-chronocratic’ (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020a), as ‘chronopolitics from below’ (Kummels, this volume). This can happen in explicit or implicit ways. An interesting case here is Wilk’s (2002) study on television, time and the national imaginary in Belize. Wilk argues that techno-scientific innovations are important instruments in colonial and developmental discourses. Yet the introduction of satellite television created coevalness between the metropole and the periphery, the elites and the ‘others’, thus challenging what he calls colonial time, geographical distance, cultural lag and thus political order (Wilk 2002).
Although she does not focus on media in her seminal article on the anthropology of time, Munn (1992: 94) noted that ‘we cannot analyze or talk about time without using media already encoded with temporal meanings’, thus pointing at the close entanglement of media and time. Similarly, influential works in media anthropology and communication studies stress the co-constitutiveness of media and time.
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the medium is the message. He also contended that the message of any medium or technology is ‘the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’ (McLuhan 2001: 18), no matter whether it is the mechanical clock or electric technology, emphasising the ‘multiplicity, rather than repeatability, of rhythms’ (McLuhan 2013 [1964]: 105). McLuhan’s notion of the global village describes how the entire world becomes more interconnected through media technologies (McLuhan 2013 [1964]; McLuhan and Powers 1995). Through such electric technology, he argues, ‘we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned’ (McLuhan 2013 [1964]: 5). Postill (2002, 2010) in his work on the Iban in Sarawak shows how calendar and clock time, through the introduction of radio and television, changed people’s timing and temporalities in social life. He explains, for instance, how women started to structure their working days around radio shows, whereas men’s time was structured through waged workplaces, and how TV shows at night, after work, brought all segments of the longhouse population together. Wilk (2002: 179) uses the case of the introduction of satellite television in Belize to argue for the liberating feature of television in the country, as broadcasts were not only immediate, but marginalised groups could now watch the same programmes at the same time as their more privileged counterparts – a reminder of Anderson’s (1983) imagined communities creating national identity through the simultaneous consumption of news(papers).
Importantly, as Moores (2005: 4) argues, building on Giddens’ (1979) theory of structuration and following his call to grasp time-space relations in all social interaction, these are no one-way processes, and media both operate in wider temporal orderings of society but also contribute to ‘the creation, maintenance or transformation of social time’. Such seeming effortless adaptation as Postill has described for the Iban is not always the case when new media technologies are introduced into households. Working from home, for instance, can be facilitated by new media technologies, but, at the same time, can also make it difficult to keep work and family time apart, as Kjaerulff (2010) has shown for rural teleworkers in Denmark.
Visuals are particularly interesting to study when it comes to time and temporality. As indicated before, the simultaneous consumption of TV programmes can disturb distance and hierarchies. But there is also something more particular to images. Faris (2002) in his work on the gaze of Western humanism describes how there is a long-held notion that photography can freeze a certain moment and thus transcend temporality. He argues that the opposite is true:
Photography represents a shutter stop/closing, a deliberative avoidance of any and all other notions of time … photography’s rigidly fixed single dimension obviously cannot transcend time, particularly if such time involves (as it always does) the possibility of an alternative historical discourse, completely opaque or invisible to photography.
(ibid.: 78–79)
In her comprehensive study of news images, Gürsel (2016) shows that the shift from the analogue to the digital not only meant that images could be moved faster across large distances, but it also meant a shift in how the timing of the images impacted the spaces they moved through. She opens her book with the example of an unprocessed analogue roll of film arriving at the office of a visual news content provider on a Friday afternoon. Had it arrived at a different time, it would have been pushed to the photo editors. But on a Friday afternoon with personal time impending, these analogue images, even though transported by express courier and shot ‘only two days earlier’, were disregarded until the following week and then immediately consigned to the archives. Gürsel further describes that when planes were grounded in the US after the September 11 attacks, analogue images could no longer be moved as before, aiding the shift to digital. Thus, she illustrates how personal lives and political contexts can have severe implications for the timing of shifts in media practices.
Looking at family photographs in English homes, Drazin and Frohlich (2007) have discussed printed photographs as a way of materialising intentions for the future, thus seeing these as embodying temporal connections. Temporal connections are differently played out for Vium (2018), who engaged in collaborative photographic re-enactments in central Australia, using anthropologists’ archival images of bygone eras, allowing for what he calls ‘cross-temporal dialogue’. The collaboration Vium engages in echoes how, as cameras have proliferated as consumer items across the world and the digital has afforded possibilities of collaborative storing across time and space, image archives are no longer merely collections produced by and accessible to only a handful (see also chapters by Atef and Bublatzky). Bandak, Crone and Mollerup (2024), looking at a variety of archive types related to Syria after 2011, have argued that image archiving enables a grip not only on the past, but also on the present and the future. Looking at one way of engaging with such archives, namely through documentary film-making, Crone and Mollerup (2024) argue that certain Syrian documentaries perform a teleological reordering, allowing for new orientations towards the future. While digital archiving and documentary films can enable a prolonged lingering on images, platforms such as Snapchat introduced transience as the main temporal logic. However, Handyside and Ringrose (2017) found that Snapchat offered young people in England temporal fastness and ephemerality as well as fixity.
These trends appear to have intensified in the digital age, an era that has not only accelerated connectivity and compressed time, but also multiplied the temporalities that users must navigate (Reading 2011a: 301). The transformation of time through information technologies is the foundation for what Castells (2010: 460) calls the network society, in which people are increasingly on ‘flex-time’ and navigate different time regimes and multitasking. He sees this as a shift towards ‘timeless time’, where traditional sequencing is disrupted, allowing for continuous simultaneity and omnipresence (ibid.: xiii). Consequently, the network society fractures conventional notions of time, replacing linear, irreversible and predictable temporalities with more fluid and fragmented ones (ibid.: 463).
Kitchin (2023) contends that digital technologies have reconfigured temporal relations and produced a new time consciousness. Many of us can now instantly access information and services at any time, fill ‘dead’ time with online activity, deal with various tasks and temporalities at the same time, communicate in synchronous and asynchronous ways, participate on global online games, work flexible hours, etc. (ibid.: 3, 21). As indicated with Moores earlier, it is important to not buy into a media-deterministic approach, where digital technologies are seen to determine time and temporality, but consider this to be a two-way process in which digital media afford certain temporalities, but are themselves shaped by temporal processes (Kitchin 2023: 23, 37; see also Markham 2023a; Wajcman 2015). Meanwhile, as the chapters of this volume testify, we must bear in mind the vast differences in access across empirical settings.
As our chapter contributors show, claims that suggest that technology enables us ‘to escape the contexts of its existence’ (Castells 2010: 464) are rather illusionary and unrealistic. Castells (ibid.: 465) himself admits that new hierarchies emerge between those included in and those excluded from his visionary network society – those still tied to linear chronological time and those enmeshed in network time. As we wish to argue, Castells (2010: 497) is too optimistic when he says that ‘timelessness sails in an ocean surrounded by time-bound shores, from where still can be heard the laments of time-chained creatures’ – network time, next to its liberating and empowering effects, also causes suffering, domination, stress and what Kitchin (2023: 43) calls ‘temporal density, squeezes and pressures’. It makes sense to argue for the coexistence of more ‘traditional’ temporal modalities and network time that inflect each other, with network time also being fragmented, produced across multiple platforms (Kitchin 2023: 24) – continuity and change mutually constituting each other. Time is experienced ‘through the negotiation between the various temporal logics of technologies and symbolic content’ (Keightley 2013: 68).
This is borne out in Ingrid Kummels’ chapter, where she explores the strategic combination of different temporalities, including clock-and-calendar time, Indigenous calendrical reckonings, digital temporalities and hegemonic temporalities. She analyses how Zapotec and Ayuujk alternative media practitioners engaged in a politics of time to overcome isolation and immobility between Mexico and the US. She explains how they turned what she calls a ‘lived calendar’ into a chronopolitical instrument against temporalities imposed on them as unauthorised migrants and labourers, thus imbuing hegemonic temporal regimes with the temporality of political activism (cf. Rigney 2018). We find other kinds of power dynamics and temporalities addressed in Martin Slama’s chapter, in which he addresses how different conceptions of time engender temporal hierarchisation that place certain people in bygone eras due to their media practices. Slama’s work takes us to Islamic SMS preaching in Indonesia to explore entanglements between religious and technological temporal logics.
Digitisation and increasing connectivity are thus not only about the compression of time, but the emergence of multiple temporalities, including acceleration, slowing down, continuity and change.
Digitalisation and the increasing social media saturation of societies worldwide are usually associated with the acceleration of time that is key to speeding up our lives and overheating our world (Eriksen 2016b; Virilio 2006). Whereas virality – the rapid and widespread sharing of content – is not mentioned in Manuel Castells’ (2010) work on the network society, it has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention since the rise of social media (e.g. Patel and Postill 2023; Penney 2016; Postill 2014a; Wasik 2009). Such focus on connectedness and speed misses other temporalities co-constituted by digital technology or existing in parallel, with important intersections, including historical time and processes of remembering (e.g. Keightley 2012a: 4).
The media scholar Emily Keightley (e.g. 2012a, 2013) criticises one-sided and speed-focused notions of digital temporalities. In ‘From Immediacy to Intermediacy’ (2013) she challenges the acceleration narrative and media-determinism and looks instead into the diversity of media-related experiences of time and the relational nature of temporal experiences (cf. Wajcman 2019). Users are not only ‘victims’ of the accelerated speed of digital technology, but also co-shaping emerging temporalities and integrating them differently into their lifeworlds. As she argues:
While analyses of the temporal logics of media technologies are important, it is only through an analysis of mediated time as produced through the uses and reception of media [realized in everyday life] that the multiple and various temporalities which are supported, shaped and performed through mediated cultural life, can be assessed, [including] the imaginative and symbolic provisions of the media and the ways in which these are involved in the production of time and temporal experience.
(Keightley 2013: 55–56)
The hype about media and accelerated change often neglects the hybrid character of contemporary media landscapes (Chadwick 2013) – the theme of various contributions to this volume, where old and new media interact in multiple ways, continuity and change coexist and multiple (mediated) temporalities are produced and experienced differently by users with different social, class or gender backgrounds (Keightley, Mihelj and Punathambekar 2021).
The hegemony of speed is challenged by competing temporalities in people’s everyday lives and the various roles they have in relation to diverse social and nonhuman rhythms, by existing sociopolitical contexts and social and institutional frameworks of temporal meaning, and by power relations in which they are experienced (Bear 2014; Keightley 2013: 71; see also Bandak and Anderson 2022; Vokes and Pype 2018). Bear (2014) deploys the notion of ‘labour’ to put focus on the work through which we negotiate different, often diverging temporalities, and the clashing of seemingly universal measures or speeding of time and concrete experiences of time.
The multiplicity of temporalities can also emerge through temporalities implied in media content that enters into a relationship with the users’ temporalities (Keightley 2013: 64–65). It is through the awareness of temporal difference in such encounters that we come to experience time (ibid.: 67) – ‘instead of time being something external to ourselves that we experience, relative time is an internal feature of situated social interaction’ (Keightley 2012a: 8). It is that focus on ‘the ways in which media technologies are used and representations of time made sense of in everyday social life’ (ibid.: 13) that is at the heart of this edited volume.
Next to accelerated change, such negotiation of temporalities can also imply continuity, not only in the sense of the continuation of existing temporalities such as long-term kinship (or other institutional) obligations and affects (Bear 2014: 19), but also ‘duration, generational experience or autobiographical trajectory, or cyclical time’ (Keightley 2012a: 4). Indeed, one of the first ethnographies of internet usage emphasised continuity over change by highlighting how people in Trinidad and Tobago seamlessly integrated digital media practices into and adapted them in ways that strongly resonated with their local lifeworlds and temporal meanings (Miller and Slater 2000). Such uncompromised continuities were, however, quickly challenged in the next generation of internet ethnographies (e.g. Bräuchler 2005, 2013). Scholars focused on technology- and media-induced change, sometimes neglecting what is not necessarily changing in society and culture (or simply taken for granted) and how continuity is produced that can nonetheless be in close interrelation with change (Driessens 2023: 32–33). As Driessens (2023: 39) argues, we need to take continuity more seriously, ‘sometimes continuity can be in a relative equilibrium with change, while in other instances change poses a threat to continuity, and in still others one tends to mask or incorporate the other’. Moreover, Postill (2012, 2017) emphasises that changing media landscapes and technologies (how things are changing) do not necessarily lead to concrete social change, just like technological synchronicity does not always lead to social synchronicity (Pype 2019: 1197). In fact, many people use media – whether it is watching TV at regular times or spending time with swiping, scrolling or checking-in on social media apps (Markham 2023a: 12–13) – to create a sense of ontological security in uncertain times ‘in which biological death and the predictable cycles of clock-and-calendar time are among the only certainties’ (Postill 2010: 18).
A narrow focus on connectivity and speed also ignores those who are largely excluded from the ‘network society’ (Castells 2010: 463) or are only granted intermittent access due to dysfunctional or missing infrastructure. Pype (2019: 1197), in her study on not being in sync in Kinshasa, describes how unexpected and unwanted disconnection, either ‘due to political interference, lack of battery time or credit time (phone credit)’, determines the way people participate (or not) in electronic modernity, thus challenging the notion of ‘global coevalness’ through digital materiality. This anthropologist regards disconnection not as an exception from electronic modernity, but as ‘an alternative way of experiencing time’ that ‘interferes with political, economic or social time’ (ibid.: 1198). Pype ultimately asks us to problematise the notion of synchronicity and redirect our view from temporal sameness and simultaneity to temporal difference, disjuncture and the politics around it.
But acceleration and speed have other ‘side effects’: constant time pressure leaves little time for reflection and can also lead to a phenomenon called ‘presentism’, where ‘past and future collapse into the present, which is continuous yet lacking in continuity’ (Driessens 2023: 33). The French historian François Hartog (2015) describes presentism as the ‘omnipresent present’ (8), ‘today’s experience of time’ where ‘historical time seems to be suspended’ (17–18) and time banished (xix). Olivier Driessens, in his theoretical contribution to this volume, explores the limitations of presentism. Building on that critique, he proposes a more comprehensive new regime of historicity, called Long Time, that swaps presentism’s centripetal forces for the centrifugal forces pointing towards the long-term pasts and futures as shaped by both the Anthropocene and longtermism, a dominant ideology in Silicon Valley. In her chapter, Gudrun Rudningen explores presentism through ethnographic fieldwork at a Norwegian news organisation, showing how presentism has become the dominant temporality in the newsroom. She finds this temporal orientation towards the present to create a feeling that everything is happening simultaneously while time is standing still. In this way, time is experienced by the journalists as a void of an endless present, a never-ending now, removing the past and the future from the engagement with and experience of the present.
Digital media, but also media more generally, have fundamentally changed the ways wars and other conflicts are fought out (e.g. Allen and Seaton 1999; Bräuchler 2013; Budka and Bräuchler 2020). Digital media allow for the continuation of traditional warfare with other means as well as the emergence of new kinds of clashes and conflicts in the online space. Digital media transform how we experience, participate in and witness conflict as it is happening in the present or as something of the past (Bräuchler and Budka 2020). Meis (2020), for instance, illustrates this with mobile phone videos from the war in Syria, Adriaans (2020) with the mediated involvement of the Armenian diaspora in the US in the violent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Sumiala, Tikka and Valaskivi (2020) with the virality of digital witnessing of the shootings at the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.
Taking mobile phone visuals as an example, Reading (2011a: 303) argues that ‘it is because the mobile phone is always with us, stores information as well as sending and receiving data and usually has a camera and connection to the globital archive of the internet … it enables a new form of witnessing that can be mobilized within the globital memory field’. The digital virality of instantaneous mobile witnessing, however, is no guarantee that these images will become part of a longer-term public memory of the event. She illustrated this through the comparison of mobile witnessing of the bombing of a London underground train in 2005 and the shooting of the Iranian woman Neda Agha-Soltan following the Iranian elections in June 2009 (Reading 2011a). Meanwhile, the challenges of connectivity in conflict zones also affect how and which images make it into global circulation (Mollerup and Mortensen 2020). Further, the circulation of marginalised voices or circulation of survivor testimonies does not necessarily mean that they are heard (Bräuchler 2026).
Media also crucially shape what we consider to be a crisis, or polycrisis, as analysed in the chapter by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill. Here they show how certain influential figures use hybrid media strategies to create, propagate and accelerate the polycrisis narrative, and thus merge different temporalities or experiences of time, including the temporalities of crises, media and their own lifeworlds. This, in turn, shapes the temporality of mediated polycrisis. Crises also fundamentally shape the perception and experience of time (Bandak 2023; Holst and Mollerup 2025; Knight 2022). Digital media technologies crucially impact how we witness, measure and observe interconnected crises. As Richardson (2024: 16) argues, such technologies ‘animate and bind together crises of war, data and climate’ through messy processes of mediation. Analysing the construction and circulation of polycrisis narratives in hybrid media landscapes, Bräuchler and Postill argue in their chapter that digital media play crucial roles in the making and unmaking of crises, their framing and interconnection, and they allow us to track and analyse the discursive entanglements of (poly)crisis. Cathrine Bublatzky’s contribution to this volume explores another kind of crisis: strategising media usage to oppose the authoritarian regime in Iran. Her chapter deals with a diasporic collection of historical family and press photographs from twentieth-century Iran and asks how circulating and engaging with these objects in polymedia environments is a specific form of resistance against oppression.
Digital media have become important means to elicit, continue, witness, resolve but, importantly, also remember violence (Budka and Bräuchler 2020). They have radically transformed processes of remembering by opening up new means to work with, negotiate, document, trigger, challenge and research memory (Hoskins 2017). Memory is always mediated and remediated (borrowing, critiquing or refashioning earlier memorial media) through oral transmission, photographs, archives or, more recently, social media (Erll and Rigney 2009). The constantly evolving media landscapes make this a highly dynamic field, as Bublatzky discusses in her chapter on the remediation of an Iranian conflictual past as a form of resistance. At the same time, memory itself is an intrinsically mediating activity that ‘acts as a go-between between individual and collective identity, between mental and cultural imaging processes and between the past and future’ (van Dijck 2007: 180).
To conceptually grasp the connection between digital media and memory, and between the digital and the analogue, for instance in the case of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, Reading (2011b) uses the notion of ‘globital memory fields’ as introduced earlier. The concept refers to ‘the synergetic combination of the social and political dynamic of globalization with digitization’ in terms of memory processes and, via Bourdieu’s notion of ‘the field’, the ‘struggle by memory agents over the assemblage, mobilization and securitization of memory capital’ (Reading 2011b: 242). Digital media have provided hegemonic powers new outlets, where they can not only reinforce authoritative memory narratives, but also silence voices that aim to counter those (Simon and Zucker 2020b: 2). However, the digital also opens up space for the rise of new memory agents (Neiger, Meyers and Zandberg 2011: 11–12) and alternative memories, the pluralisation of remembering specific pasts and the establishment of virtual museums and digital memorials (e.g. Simon and Zucker 2020a; 2020b). As indicated earlier, these new dynamics do not evolve in a political vacuum, but within wider structures of power and inequality (Keightley and Schlesinger 2014: 747; Nardi et al. 2020: 2).
A variety of actors are involved in the generation of memory, each one with their specific interests and motivations. So-called witness videos in YouTube, for instance, are shaped and reshaped by various actors and interventions before and after uploading them: the ideology of the video maker, the editing process, tagging and titling, online engagement with the video, the video’s adoption (and possible manipulation) by other YouTube users and, not least, YouTube’s algorithms that decisively influence which videos are found and watched (Smit, Heinrich and Broersma 2017: 290–94). Also, it is important to keep in mind that, while digital media can render marginalised and silenced memories public, such public exposure can also render them even more vulnerable in oppressive political climates (Bräuchler 2020; Jack 2023: 13).
In his chapter in this volume, Philipp Budka takes a point of departure in early digital infrastructure and platforms for Indigenous communities living in remote areas of Canada. He explores the multifaceted role of digital archives as infrastructures and tools for collecting, storing and categorising media content and artifacts as well as for community and identity building. Ali Atef in his contribution zooms in on two particular image collections and explores the meticulous and difficult work of turning private Egyptian archives into public, digital archives in a difficult political setting. Atef sees in this process new ways to imagine the present stakes of civil society. Bublatzky, meanwhile, in her contribution, looks at even smaller-scale forms of archiving through private photographs in an exile archive from Iran as a tool of political resistance, solidarity and temporal ordering.
Wajcman (2019: 315) highlights that the idea of using technology to control and manage time is longstanding and remains central to modern visions of automation. Today, this vision is increasingly materialising through intelligent digital assistants, which, by utilising tracking capabilities and behavioural algorithms, seek to address the fundamental challenge of using time effectively. As Driessens shows in his contribution to this volume, artificial intelligence (AI) deserves specific attention when discussing the media-time nexus due to its increasingly prominent role in digital algorithmic culture. AI plays a paradoxical role in shaping time and temporality in the digital age. On the one hand, AI is celebrated for its ability to accelerate processes, optimise decision-making and automate time-intensive tasks, freeing humans for more complex and creative work. AI’s real-time monitoring and predictive capabilities, for instance, enhance efficiency across domains, from supply chain management to environmental governance, fundamentally altering how time is structured and experienced (Chen et al. 2021; Nishant, Kennedy and Corbett 2020). On the other hand, this acceleration comes with hidden temporal and environmental costs. As Wajcman (2019) argues, what seemingly ‘optimizes’ our usage of time at the same time also challenges our temporal sovereignty, with the tendency of digital tools managing our time more efficiently, but nevertheless making us feel more pressed for time than before. Moreover, the ever-increasing computational power required for advanced AI models creates an unprecedented demand for energy and resources. The rapid expansion of deep-learning projects and large-language models translates into vast timescales of machine processing. In that sense, AI appears to ‘save time’ while simultaneously generating new temporal asymmetries, including those between people with access to AI resources and those without, between those privileged by AI and those marginalised by it and between the perceived immediacy of AI-driven decision-making and AI’s long-term environmental impact (Brevini 2020; Buolamwini 2023; Spelda and Stritecky 2020; van Wynsberghe 2021). The focus in the remainder of this section is on algorithms more generally.
Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot (2014: 167) describe algorithms as coded processes that convert input data into a specific output. They emphasise how algorithms shape interactions on social networking platforms by prioritising certain friends’ updates while omitting others, for instance, thereby significantly influencing users’ temporalities. Algorithms are designed to calculate what is trending (Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot 2014: 167), thus enabling us to navigate seemingly endless data streams and making our search seemingly more time-efficient. At the same time, however, they are designed to keep us on the platform and waste time, as Pronzato shows in his chapter (this volume). Algorithms are integral parts of any digital and social media platform and the cultural shifts these new communication and information technologies trigger (Striphas 2015). In an effort to make one’s voice, product or ideology heard, producers aim ‘to make their content, and themselves, recognizable to an algorithm’ to boost their content to the top of their audience’s feeds or search results (Gillespie, Boczkowski and Foot 2014: 184). It follows that specific resources and skills are required that resonate with the algorithmic temporalities and make them work for one’s goals. This, again, is a matter of access and power.
Platforms such as Facebook or YouTube open up space for marginalised memories and participatory memory work (e.g. Garde-Hansen 2011: 107). At the same time, however, their algorithms are geared towards their business interests and a capitalist-oriented information economy (Sebald and Döbler 2018: 47). They increasingly influence what is seen, what is trending, what is remembered, what is forgotten; thus, they increasingly ‘reshape how we engage with, negotiate and remember the past’ and ‘reconfigure digital memories’ (Jacobsen 2022: 14), but also memory landscapes more broadly (see also Kaun and Stiernstedt 2016; Smit, Heinrich and Broersma 2017). This raises important questions about who gets to interpret our social media posts and how, including the possible emotions they will trigger, and who gets to decide when and what we shall forget. But it also raises questions as to who shapes our temporalities and the pace and time frames we live in. Repenning (2024: 1505), for instance, did research on fashion design platforms, examining ‘the timespace contrast between the accelerating, and instantaneous rhythms of digital media platforms and the capacity of the humans [the fashion designers], whose daily (work) lives have become dependent on such apps’. This led her to conceptualise digital media platforms as ‘a metronome that nudges the times-paces of daily (work) life’ and leads to frictions between ‘polyrhythmic encounters of daily life’ and the rhythms of the digital media platforms (Repenning 2024: 1517). As Markham (2023b: 12) notes, we should not look at an app or algorithm as ‘a discrete force that threatens to corrupt the otherwise wide-eyed, exploratory motivations of an autonomous human consciousness’, and rather focus on the users’ own experience of temporality in the present.
Simiran Lalvani, in her chapter, engages with platform workers of another kind, namely food delivery workers in Mumbai, India, employed by food delivery platforms or restaurants. With an attention to the sensory, Lalvani explores how algorithmic mediation might enable attractive counterintuitive experiences as she theorises how platform workers ‘flex’. She introduces the notion of ‘flexing’ to examine seemingly minor but consequential shifts in workers’ experiences of keeping time and the interpersonal consequences of these shifts in workers’ temporal experiences. In his chapter, Riccardo Pronzato researches how young Italian students experience ‘wasting’ time when lured into social media platforms through tailored algorithms specifically made and constantly learning from users to adapt content and keep them at the screen. He argues that these digital platforms contribute to the construction of users’ temporal experience through captivating infrastructures, communicational affordances and gamification features, and that the relationships individuals develop with these technological artifacts favour the reiteration of colonial extractive practices.
An aspect that all our chapters touch upon is how the relationship between media and time is connected to questions of power and possible forms of resistance against it. Digital technologies are taking questions of time and power to new terrain as they provide the means to both challenge and reinforce existing power structures. Couldry and Curran (2003: 6) argue that media are the results of ‘battles over who has the power to represent the reality of others’ and thus no value-neutral systems. As indicated in the ‘out of sync’ case earlier, media participation is not only a matter of global coevalness, but also a matter of skills and resources, including infrastructure, time, prior experience, social and cultural capital and networks (Bräuchler and Budka 2020: 15). Moreover, acceleration and increased connectivity inevitably lead to tensions, contradictions, conflict and uneven opportunities (Eriksen 2016a: 1), all of which are closely interlinked with power structures.
As Kitchin (2023: 197) notes, we need an intersectionality lens to explore temporal power, inequalities and discrimination across all digital technologies across ‘gender, race, class, sexuality, age, disability, culture and religion and other social markers such as household structure, employment status and job type’ and across all domains, including algorithmic violence and justice. This can be children, partners or employees being surveilled through digital apps; harassment via social media; different working hours for differently skilled groups; peer and family pressure (ibid.: 152–60); taxi drivers, maids or food delivery workers (as discussed in Lalvani’s chapter) having to synchronise with their customers’ needs (Sharma 2014); states shutting down the internet or profit-driven businesses demanding users to update software (Pype 2019: 1204, 1207); or donor countries providing or withdrawing financial aid, forcing receiving communities to accept their ‘heterochronic existence’, imposing on them various political and ethical dilemmas and ideas as to how to alleviate their condition (Kirtsoglou and Simpson 2020a: 19).
Kitchin (2023: 32) speaks of a temporal doxa, a hegemonic temporal regime in a society, that has been normalised, and Sharma (2014) describes capitalist time regimes. People and institutions with greater temporal sovereignty (Kitchin 2023: 168) can control their and others’ timing and thus reproduce their social position. Temporal power extends to how pasts and futures are remembered or envisioned and by whom, for whom. The generation of massive digital data complicates the picture and introduces problems of privacy and surveillance, access and data usage, remembering and forgetting (ibid.: 162, 168), that are all part of an emergent data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019). Repenning (2024) frames this as ‘timespace friction’, highlighting how the platform economy’s promises of real-time data, flexibility and efficiency mask the hidden struggles of acceleration, slowing down and losing control. Whereas Kitchin and others focus on the so-called Global North, in this volume we are interested in how temporal regimes informed by digital technologies potentially generate new power hierarchies, time stresses and pressures that affect people living in different parts of our world differently.
At the same time, we are interested in how the very same digital media provide the means to challenge and resist temporal power and transform established and emerging inequalities. There is a rich literature on how marginalised, oppressed and disadvantaged groups use digital platforms owned by corporate businesses to fight the establishment with their own weapons and organise protests more efficiently through ‘a shared time of dissent’ (Keightley 2012a: 1, emphasis in the original), crossing temporal and spatial boundaries (Kaun 2016: 97) – reaching from the Arab Uprisings and the Indignados movement, to Occupy, the encounters between activist cultures and digital capitalism, to the rejection of land reclamation on Bali, to name just a few examples (Barassi 2015: Bräuchler 2020; Gerbaudo 2012; Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Postill 2014b).
Another example would be Indigenous people, who are often depicted as ‘out of sync’ due to infrastructural and material limitations; however, they use digital technologies to strengthen their identity and build transnational networks of solidarity, as discussed by Budka in this volume. Ginsburg (2008) contends, drawing on Fabian’s Time and the Other (2002 ([1983]), that digital media reinscribe hegemonic chronopolitics, but, at the same time, open up space for Indigenous people to become producers of media representations of their own lives, or, as others have shown, to resist state interventions and the destruction of their lands and cultures. The case of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the US illustrates how media are used to recolonise and impose hegemonic temporalities and risk assessments on Indigenous people (Bacon 2020), but, at the same time, provide the means to continue their anticolonial struggle through the #NoDAPL movement (Estes 2024). And Kummels (2023) discusses Latin American Indigenous activism’s transnational outreach and media strategies for decolonising media spaces and temporalities.
Let us briefly sum up the volume’s main thrust before introducing its structure. This volume argues that media and time are deeply intertwined, with media not only shaping temporal experiences but also being shaped by them. A key premise is that time is not a neutral or uniform category but is socially, culturally, politically and technologically constructed. The chapters challenge the notion that digital media merely accelerate time; instead, they present a more complex picture where media can simultaneously disrupt, fragment, slow down, reorder and challenge temporalities, including a diversified engagement with the past and the future. Media actively produce temporalities, but people’s temporalities also shape media usage; these temporalities are also conditioned by political, economic and historical forces. The volume critiques dominant perspectives that focus on media’s role in speeding up life, instead examining how media also mediate power, inequality and exclusion through temporal hierarchisation and de-hierarchisation. Several chapters use, explicitly or implicitly, the concept of ‘chronocracy’ to describe how temporal regimes enforce domination and social asymmetries, but the chapters also point at (anti-chronocratic) strategies for how to challenge such chronocracy. Ultimately, the volume calls for a rethinking of the media-time relationship, asking for a more nuanced, comparative and historically situated understanding of how media and time co-constitute each other in an increasingly digital and interconnected world.
As we have introduced all contributions to this volume briefly throughout the introduction, we will here only provide a brief overview of the book structure that reflects the structure of this introductory chapter. Assigning a chapter to a specific section aims to reflect its main thrust, but does not imply that there are no overlaps between the sections. Each chapter usually speaks to more than one section (partly reflected in the way we reference them throughout this introduction).
In a first section entitled ‘Time Regimes’, we find Ingrid Kummels’ chapter on ‘Communalising the Future: Indigenous Media and their Expansion of Calendar Time Across the US-Mexican Border’. It is followed by Martin Slama’s discussion of ‘Temporal (De)Hierarchisations: Modernist Tropes and Islamic Media Practices’.
Section two is entitled ‘Presentism and Beyond’. Here we first present Olivier Driessens’ theoretical chapter entitled ‘From Presentism to Long Time: The New Regime of Historicity Caught Between the Anthropocene and Longtermism’. This is followed by a contribution by Gudrun Rudningen investigating ‘Working in the Never-Ending Now: Presentism in Digital Journalism’.
A third section is entitled and explores different ‘Crisis Temporalities’. It starts off with a chapter by Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill on ‘Media, Time and Polycrisis in a Hybrid Media World’ and closes with Cathrine Bublatzky’s contribution on ‘Polymedia and the Remediation of an Iranian Conflictual Past’ where she looks into ‘An Exile Photo Archive as a Form of Resistance’.
Section four engages with ‘Archiving Temporalities’ and presents two chapters that work with digital archives in different ways. Ali Atef’s chapter explores ‘The Affect of Media-Time’ and involves ‘Reflections from a Sociocultural Anthropologist in Audio-Visual Archives in Contemporary Cairo’. Philipp Budka in his chapter writes about ‘Entangled Archives and Infrastructures: Tracing and Reconstructing Sociotechnical Histories, Biographies and Digital Sovereignty in Northwestern Ontario, Canada’.
In section five we delve into ‘Algorithmic Time’. Riccardo Pronzato in his contribution offers a discussion on ‘Colonising Digital Time: A Study of Users’ Temporal Experience on Digital Platforms’. Simiran Lalvani, in her case study on delivery workers in Mumbai, reflects on ‘Can the Worker-as-Platform-User Flex?’.
The volume is closed by an afterword by Ann Rigney entitled ‘Untimely Mediations’, in which she captures the connections of revolutionary moments and power struggles with societal organisations of time through a historical prism. Rigney reminds us that mediation is not restricted to the use of particular technologies; making sense of time entails a cultural repertoire of sense-making tools that are historically contingent.
Birgit Bräuchler (PhD) is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include media and digital anthropology; conflict and peace studies; environmental anthropology; activism and brokerage; Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Cyberidentities at War (2005/2013, transcript/Berghahn), Reconciling Indonesia (2009, Routledge), The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015, Palgrave), Theorising Media and Practice (2010, Berghahn; with John Postill), Theorising Media and Conflict (2020, Berghahn; with Philipp Budka), and Patterns of Im/mobility, Conflict and Identity (2022, Routledge), and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.
Nina Grønlykke Mollerup is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She researches how images of violence are produced, and how they are used to establish truths and narratives by following shifting understandings of images over time, particularly in relation to human rights and justice. She collaborates closely with civil society organisations.