Call for Papers

We are looking to feature 6-8 articles (traditional research papers and less conventional items like interviews and roundtables) and an introduction for this issue. Pursuing this special issue will require foregrounding temporality and thinking creatively about its role in research and practice. We have attached a recent article from the Journal which gives a straightforward sense of how time may be conceived in relation to migration and humanitarian protection.

If you have a research article under progress, an idea for an article, or an interest in collaborating with another member of our network for this special issue, we would love to hear from you. We will work with all those interested in submitting, as required, on developing their articles. As part of that, we will run a paper-drafting workshop in September.

Social scientific research geared toward humanitarian protection often engages with the direct and visibly urgent effects of crises. While invaluable in its own right, this type of engagement can undermine the importance of comprehending the ways in which protracted crises may have significant indirect and invisible effects over time. Indeed, such crises produce social and political conflicts, as well as obstacles to lasting peace, which go unnoticed if the short-term tools of policy are the primary lens through which research is conducted.

For this special issue of Time and Society, we present case studies from around the world which offer alternatives to dominant conceptions of time in humanitarian protection. The studies range in methodology and geographic context, from innovative psychological accounts of time and trauma in the work of the Palestine Trauma Center to empirical research into the time of waiting for sexual assault victims in Kenya. Other studies pose historical and literary inquiries into how indigenous concepts and practices, which emerged organically over time, may replace the dominant lexicons of humanitarian organizations.

What unites the articles in this issue is an urgent sense that foregrounding the temporal dimensions of humanitarian protection allows us to more carefully examine, challenge, and offer alternatives to the default understanding of time in social science and public policy. This may result in the development of synergies across geographic contexts, innovations in methodology, and thinking about compound harm – from colonial remnants and nationalism to environmental catastrophe – from a more expansive temporal vantage.