Temporal Privilege: Time, Power, and Possibility

We all inhabit a range of temporalities, but some ways of rendering time have greater power to determine the course of events. In an Indigenous land claims case, settlers’ linear conception of history is privileged over the dynamic ways Native peoples tell the passing of time. In the case of a former child soldier, an international court insists that childhood abuse and indoctrination are not relevant to crimes committed in adulthood. In these stories, and many others like them, dominant conceptions of time shape whose voices are heard and whose are not—but if we understand time otherwise, different outcomes become possible.

Jill Stauffer identifies the way certain experiences of time are valued over others as “temporal privilege” and shows how this concept helps illuminate injustices that are often hidden in plain sight. By acknowledging the workings of temporal privilege, we can instead learn to think from a standpoint of temporal pluralism, taking into account the different forms and contexts of time. Ranging from the legacies of settler colonialism to ways to reimagine clocks and calendars, Temporal Privilege reveals how a more capacious understanding of time opens new paths toward human flourishing and justice.