The Transmitted Past: Toward a Rethinking of Geography, Temporality, and Community
How do we make a common world? This talk answers that question by focusing on the role that temporality plays in the making of both places and communities. Articulating a concept of the ‘transmitted past,’ Timur Hammond, associate professor in the Geography and Environment Department at Syracuse University, argues that geographers ought to think of the past as what Annemarie Mol would term the ‘multiple.’ Such an approach helps us better understand the instruments through which we both know and construct the past; the possibility for different pasts to be spatially co-present and yet socially distinct; and the moments of friction and encounter when different places and their pasts breach one into the other. These insights, Dr. Hammond suggests, have broader implications for how geographers and others understand the politics and possibilities of the present moment.
