The British Academy has announced three multidisciplinary, cross-border research programmes exploring practical challenges facing industry, policy & society within themes of 'just transitions' and 'global (dis)order. We are proud to share that one of these Global Convening Programmes 2023 awardees is CenSoF Learning Domain lead Professor Keri Facer, who will work on ‘The Times of a Just Transition’ with University of Bristol colleague Professor Nomi Claire Lazar.

This grant is a new flagship initiative from the Academy intended to ‘break new ground’ by bringing together an international team of scholars to work on a blue skies topic. ‘The Times of a Just Transition’ brings together scholars such as Arturo Escobar (Colombia), award-winning poet Rukmini Nair (India), philosopher of time Michelle Bastian (UK), legal scholar Nomi Lazar (Canada), and many others to explore how the way that we think about time shapes how we can imagine and create sustainability transitions in different parts of the world. Professor Facer's own research, as part of this programme, will continue her work on educating the temporal imagination – developing public pedagogies for thinking with time in sustainability transitions.

Professor Keri Facer explains: ‘By bringing together African, Anglo-American, Francophone, Indigenous, Feminist, Latin American and Indian scholarship we hope, for the first time, to overcome the temporal blindness that too often structures our thinking about climate change, and open up new ways of negotiating justice in a warming world. It will be very exciting to see what comes from putting these different projects into dialogue'.

More specifically, this programme brings together scholars from six continents and 14 disciplines to transform our understanding of the role of time and timing in producing justice and injustice in sustainability transitions. Working in highly diverse local sustainability struggles relating to land, cities, identities and the imagination - the team will explore how temporal frames and narratives are being (mis)used to define climate problems and solutions, how timing mechanisms prioritise, coordinate and exclude different actors and ways of life, how different rhythms of life are being aligned or alienated, and how uses of time as a form of invisible power are structuring the possibilities for justice for communities in the Global South and marginalised North. Increased awareness and understanding of these timing mechanisms will expand political and civic capacities to detect sources of misalignment and miscommunication, lay new foundations for dialogue across difference, and open-up the possibility of a pluriversal politics.