Exploring New Temporal Horizons - Abridged by Carmen Leccardi & Paolo Jedlowski & Alessandro Cavalli (Hardcover)

About the Book

Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, the book offers an intervention to the current 'temporal crisis' of social life and sociological debates.

Book Synopsis

In this book, leading sociologists explore how, in our digital age of connectivity, temporal acceleration and real-time simultaneity impact personal experience, relations between generations and institutional processes. The authors analyse the entanglement between past and future and explain how our ability to conceive the future is based not only upon the memory of the past, but also on forecasts about environmental crisis. Bringing memory and future studies into a unique dialogue, they highlight the crucial role of the past elaboration processes in freeing the future from the weight of trauma and renewing the ability to hope. Offering a sophisticated and innovative social theory in a burgeoning field, this is a much-needed intervention to the current 'temporal crisis' of social life and sociological debates.

Review Quotes

"With consistently insightful analysis, the authors ask us to remember the past and transcend the short-sighted present so we can address global problems by imagining alternative futures." Michael Flaherty, Eckerd College

"A true tour-de-force. This book proposes an original vision of our experiences of time: a motley temporal composition in which the present, the future and the past are structured in an unprecedented way and without primacy of one over the other. An outstanding short book about the challenges of our time." Danilo Martuccelli, Université Paris Cité and Universidad Diego Portales

About the Author

Carmen Leccardi is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Culture at the University of Milan-Bicocca. Paolo Jedlowski is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calabria. Alessandro Cavalli is former Professor of Sociology at the University of Pavia