Beyond Time and Space

A UMass Boston Conference, inspired by MIT's “Liberating Temporality and Spatiality” meeting.

Inspired by the recently announced, stunningly brave conference on “Liberating Temporality and Spatiality”¹, by MIT’s Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Sexuality, we, here at UMass Boston, decided to launch our own conference, on the same subject. Move over, MIT. We may be a mere R2 public university turned a social justice NGO, but as far as the non-scientific stuff goes, we can always do better!

From the announcement²:

“Time and space, while often seen as linear and confined concepts, can be stretched, altered, and reconfigured. We move through time and space in fits & bursts; some ways of moving and being are deemed normative or “good” and brought to the forefront³ while others might be marginalized and cast aside⁴. Here, we instead cast aside normative ideas of time and and space to focus on how liberating the concepts of temporality and spatiality can help us imagine and create new futures⁵, communities, and ways of being.”

Now, we are happy to present our own key panels:

• Forever Young: Temporal Flexibility and its Implications for the Anti-Aging Industry. Panel discussion: Relativistic time dilation: solution to the age-old problem of the old age or perpetuation of the hetero-patriarchal beauty standards?

• Eddies in Space-Time: Can Space-Time Wormholes Help to Eliminate Flight Delays and at What Cost? Synopsis: Post-pandemic airport delays and cancellations can be reduced using the wormholes through the oppressed to femto-size marginalized spatio-temporal dimensions, all 17 of them. However, one must be mindful of the climate justice and global equity implications.

• Spatio-Temporal Liberation and Decolonization: Is time travel possible? (Cancelled, as the speaker traveled back in time and accidentally prevented zir grandparents from meeting).

• Reversing The Arrow of Time as a Decolonization Process. Synopsis: The past affects our lives, but we are helpless to change it; addressing such an oppressive asymmetry is the next frontier of the social justice movement.

• A Geodesic Line is the Best Way of Getting from Space-Time Point A to Space-Time Point B: and so What? Synopsis: “Best” is a white supremacy concept: everybody and everything is perfect in their own right (except white male cis-hets of course). This panel ends with a draft of a letter to CERN demanding the creation of light that chooses all paths in equal equitable measure (i.e. old-patriarchal-geodesics-excluding), as a first priority⁶ .

• Toxic Masculinity of the Linearization. Synopsis: Using the “linear” → “straight” → “masculine” or “hetero-centered“ → “toxic-oppressive” paradigm, we deconstruct the conventional linearization of Einstein’s equations. It appears imperative to require every new theory be inclusively non-linear, not to mention circular⁷.

We welcome submissions from all walks of the space-time fits and bursts.

Practical info: Unlike the MIT conference, there is no submission deadline, as the concept of deadline is chrononormative. For the same reason, we do not limit the presentation times. The conference will take place across multiple dimensions and spatio-temporal locations.

1. Not fake.

2. Not fake.

3. …in a manner of speaking, as “forefront” assumes spatial linearity.

4. …in a manner of speaking, as “aside” assumes spatial directionality.

5. …in a manner of speaking, as “future” assumes temporal linearity.

6. Forget the supersymmetry!

7. Never mind we will never see a gravitational image of a black hole again.