On January 23rd, The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters hosted a 'lunch seminar' for its members, featuring a lecture by Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal, a former fellow of the CAS project 'In Sync: How Synchronisation and Mediation Produce Collective Times, Then and Now', led by Helge Jordheim and Espen Ytreberg (both professors at the University of Oslo) in 2018/2019. In this seminar, Sine shared her insights on Norwegian stave churches.
In Sync
In Sync
How Synchronisation and Mediation Produce Collective Times, Then and Now
Principal investigators
Abstract
The InSync project produced theoretical and conceptual insights into the ways media enable so-called synchronisation, and in so doing, help constitute social collectives. To put it more simply: we live together by the ways we understand time together, and media are our main means of arriving at that joint understanding. Some key premises for InSync's inquiry were known beforehand: conceptual history tells us that time is essentially plural, the social sciences suggest that some kind of order must be imposed on this plural time for social collectives to be formed, and media studies has charted some of the ways that media order time. InSync pursued these issues via the concept of "synchronisation", applying it to a wide range of media and cases old and recent. The project was able to uncover the pervasiveness of mediated synchronisations, the forms of socially situated work that go into them, the crucial role of scales and scaling, and how the production of collective social and political times both engages and suppresses the times of nature. The strongly interdisciplinary nature of the project led to an emphasis on establishing the project as a meeting point, by hosting frequent academic events with a broad range of collaborators.
Fellows