The companion text reflects on the ideas behind the Chronicle’s feature “Profile of the Slow Movement Party Leader, Alina Sho,” exploring how alternative temporalities and movements for temporal justice might emerge within Chronoberg’s political landscape

Alison Oldfield and Michel Alhadeff-Jones

We collaborated on two connected pieces for The Chronoberg Chronicle—a news article titled “Qubit’s Fall: Mayor’s Statue Toppled in New Times Square,” about political tensions surrounding the city’s New Times Square, and a profile of the Slow Movement party leader, Alina Sho.

Our personal and professional questions around time shaped both pieces. We were particularly interested in exploring tensions between opposing orientations to time—contrasting a dominant, linear, productivity-oriented relationship with time and others that value multiplicity and difference. Describing these contrasting temporalities in vivid, almost caricatured ways helped us articulate where they diverge, how they collide, and what it might mean to live differently with time. We also wanted to show that living otherwise is not idyllic or seamless. Every new rhythm carries traces of the old; temporal lives remain contested.

The setting and action were explicitly political, since control and coordination of time determine what ways of living and being are valued in society. The reported action—the toppling of a statue representing a particular way of life—echoes current debates over public monuments and contested legacies, such as statues of merchants involved in the slave trade in Switzerland and Bristol, or Confederate generals in the United States. We asked ourselves how what is celebrated in one era—as in Qubit (a “quantic byte,” the fundamental unit in quantum computing)—might appear troubling or even reprehensible in another. The piece thus became a way of questioning how the era of the “great acceleration,” which we now inhabit, could be seen from the vantage point of “new times.”

It was far more challenging to imagine alternatives to modern temporalities. To do so, we drew inspiration from the “slow” movements that intentionally temper pace and celebrate deliberate, sustainable ways of living, rather than measuring value by speed or efficiency. Yet we wanted to move beyond the idea that slowing down is the only alternative. There are many plural times—human and more-than-human. Thinking through how these different paces might coexist, and how they could be recognised and valued, led to the creation of the “Temporal Diversity League” party.

We placed the story in New Times Square, drawing inspiration from Henri Lefebvre’s ideas about how urban space shapes rhythms and movements. We wanted readers to ask what kinds of rhythms a city like Chronoberg might enable—and how it could be designed to sustain diverse relationships to time.

The challenge of depicting multiple temporal ways of living provoked broader questions that we addressed in the accompanying profile piece. How do such movements arise? Who inspires them? What does leadership look like? How is time experienced or expressed? The character of Alina Sho was inspired by thinkers and activists who explore alternative temporalities, particularly in disability studies and notions of crip time, where lived, embodied experiences of time may diverge from—or conflict with—normative linearity (Kafer, 2013). We sought to imagine what stories and experiences could inspire shifts in temporal practice, and how a fractured relationship with productive time might open pathways toward other forms of temporal flourishing.

Reference
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press.

This companion text situates the Chronicle article within real-world struggles over Indigenous temporalities and intergenerational accountability among Ngāi Tahu in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Matthew Scobie

The Kinship Time Library Under Threat article is a barely veiled metaphor for the context I have found myself in over the duration of the Times of a Just Transition Global Convening Programme.

Broadly, my project set out to explore practices of intergenerational accountability within Ngāi Tahu, a large Māori kin group based in Te Waipounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand—a group of which I am a member. For Ngāi Tahu, accountability is a practice based on relationships and mutual obligations within and across generations, mediated through whakapapa (a structured genealogical relationship between all things) and mana (authority) (Scobie et al., 2025). This accountability is based on Ngāi Tahu temporalities which, at risk of simplification, exist as kinship time: time understood through responsibilities to kin (Whyte, 2021). History is the domain of past kin, but the past is also seen as the days in front. Different generations coalesce into an “eternal present” so that myths are narrated in the present tense, where individuals generations apart speak together in the now. This temporality, brought into the speculative space of Chronoberg, became a concrete accountability mechanism in that world.

Ngāi Tahu intergenerational accountability was disrupted by the dispossession of Ngāi Tahu lands, self-determining authority, and resources through colonisation (Scobie et al., 2020). As a result of reparations for these grievances, Ngāi Tahu are reclaiming their taonga (resources), reconstructing their economies, and reasserting their self-determining authority. Yet all of this is now threatened by the climate crisis and the failure of successive colonial governments to either act—or allow Ngāi Tahu to act. Ngāi Tahu are currently developing a futures strategy for 2050, to which my work was intended as a contribution.

During this period, however, the political context in Aotearoa New Zealand drastically changed. A right-wing coalition government was elected in late 2023. Within their first 100 days, the government set out to systematically unpick hard-won Indigenous rights, undermine its own responsibilities as a Treaty partner, and drive a wedge between layers of government and Māori political authority.

Indigenous peoples create their own histories, but not always under conditions of their own choosing.

While I was peripherally involved in Ngāi Tahu’s 2050 strategy—imagining how to create an accountability mechanism allowing future generations to hold us to account for our decisions (and whether this was even appropriate within our temporal practices)—the political conditions were rapidly deteriorating. Many public services and accountability mechanisms between Māori and the Crown were defunded or threatened (Willson & Scobie, 2024). It was hard to think about 2050, or making it there, when Treaty rights and taonga were being aggressively undermined.

It was this idea of intergenerational accountability, based on kinship time—where the who is more important than the when—that inspired the Kinship Time Library. But the political crisis I found myself in, and the urgent need to respond to these conditions, shaped the struggle around that library.

References
Scobie, M., Norris, E., & Willson, H. (2025). Intergenerational accountability in the times of just transitions. Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, 38(5), 1405–1427.
Whyte, K.P. (2021). “Time as kinship.” In The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, Cambridge University Press, pp. 39–55.
Willson, H., & Scobie, M. (2024). Fiscal accountability to te Tiriti o Waitangi: mechanisms and measures. Policy Quarterly, 20(3), 32–38.

This companion text links the Chronicle’s story of the Clock-Kitchen to research on repair cultures, temporal politics, and the participatory module developed in the “Welcome to Chronoberg” workshop.

Johannes Stripple

The idea for The Clock-Kitchen started with a question: what would a clock-story look like in Chronoberg? I wanted to imagine what clocks might mean in a city where time is visible, debatable, and politically alive. The first image that came to mind was a hybrid space — somewhere between a repair shop and a marketplace — where people could both mend and exchange their clocks.

This idea grew from my long-standing interest in urban repair spaces: community workshops where people come together to fix everyday things and, in doing so, practice forms of care, maintenance, and reciprocity. Such places have always fascinated me because they challenge the culture of disposability. They are not just about repairing objects, but about repairing relations — with materials, with others, and with the rhythms of daily life.

When I first shared the idea with Michelle Bastian, she suggested reframing it: what if the space was not only about repairing clocks but about repurposing them? That shift — from repair to repurposing — opened up new ways of thinking. It implied that time itself could be hacked, reimagined, and adapted to fit people’s lives. The Clock-Kitchen thus became a speculative civic workshop where citizens collectively reconfigure their temporal devices — not to make them more efficient, but to make them more theirs.

The idea of the Clock-Kitchen was later carried forward into a participatory workshop module in Welcome to Chronoberg.In this activity, participants are invited to imagine or design their own clocks — devices that express personal or collective rhythms. These invented timepieces often capture alternative temporalities: a clock that runs on daylight rather than hours, or one that pauses during moments of rest.

This companion text reflects on how ideas of ripening, waiting, and culinary timing inspired the Chronicle’s exploration of food as a temporal art.

Johannes Stripple

Unlike several of the other Chronoberg Chronicle pieces, this story did not grow out of sustained research in a particular field site or discipline. Instead, it emerged from a long-standing fascination with food and dining as cultural experiences — and particularly with fine dining as an art form where time, attention, and anticipation play as central a role as taste.

I have long been interested in how food practices express different temporalities: the slow ripening of fruit, the patient maturation of cheese, the alchemy of fermentation, and the choreography of multi-course meals. In all of these, time is not something to be measured but an essential ingredient. The Ripened Table began by taking this logic to its extreme: what if a restaurant abandoned clock-time entirely and let the timing of the ingredients decide when the meal was ready?

This inversion — where the guest waits for the food, not the other way around — offered a way to explore waiting as both a practice and a privilege. In such a world, dining becomes an act of surrender to non-human rhythms: to ripening, aging, and decay. Luxury, then, is not about abundance or speed but about the capacity to wait for the right moment.

I was also intrigued by how fine dining, often associated with excess, might become a form of temporal reflection. At The Ripened Table, refinement lies not in rare ingredients or complex techniques, but in the synchronization between the life of matter and the life of the diner. The chefs become timekeepers and translators, working in service of ripeness rather than reservation schedules.

If the Clock-Kitchen represents Chronoberg’s civic experiment in temporal repair, then The Ripened Table is its sensual counterpart — a reminder that time can also be savored. It invites us to think of patience not as delay but as devotion, and to experience the taste of a moment that could only arrive when everything — and everyone — is truly ready.

This companion text reflects on how personal memories of playing tennis, the experience of discovering cricket, and early workshop explorations of time-regulated and timeless sports inspired the Chronicle’s playful reflection on Chronoberg’s temporal culture.

Johannes Stripple

The idea for Time-Regulated Tennis came from a mix of memory, curiosity, and play. I played tennis in my youth — well into my thirties — and still remember the feel of a long rally stretching time into something elastic, the rhythm of concentration where seconds dissolve into motion. Also in my youth, attending my first cricket match, I was astonished when a local explained, with pride, that “the game can go on for days.” That moment stayed with me. It made me realize how sports carry their own philosophies of time: some are strictly measured; others unfold at the pace of weather, patience, and endurance.

In one of our Crafting Chronoberg workshops, we began to explore that distinction — sports that are time-bound versus those that are time-free. We started playing with the idea that this simple difference could stand as a metaphor for life in Chronoberg itself: a city constantly negotiating between regulation and rhythm, efficiency and experience, clock time and lived time. From those conversations, time-regulated tennis emerged as both a thought experiment and a satire — a sport trying to impose industrial precision on a game traditionally defined by its open-endedness.

Writing the piece, I wanted to capture the humor and ambivalence of that shift. The match between Percival Sundale and Lucas Mendez became a way to dramatize the tension between two temporal traditions that run through Chronoberg: Unitarianism, with its emphasis on standardization and synchronization, and Pluralism, which celebrates slower, situational forms of coordination.

At its heart, though, the story was meant to be playful — a sports report that doubles as a metaphor for the city’s wider struggles with time. Through the cheers (or silences) of the crowd, the debate between fans and officials, and the protests of the Temporal Diversity League, the piece hints at something larger: how communities hold on to their rhythms even as new temporalities take hold.

Like the game itself, Chronoberg is divided between the clock and the rally, between deadlines and duration. And just as in sport, perhaps the beauty lies not in choosing one side, but in learning to play — and live — somewhere in between.

This companion text reflects on how the idea of citywide seasonal pauses emerged from conversations about work–life balance, scheduling, and the playful bureaucracies of time that define Chronoberg.

Johannes Stripple

The idea for Citywide Seasonal Breaks grew out of many conversations that helped shape Chronoberg — about calendars, coordination, work rhythms, and the struggle to find balance in collective life. Again and again, we returned to the question of how time is organized and who decides when a city should pause.

For me, the initial spark came from something very ordinary: the sportlov, the winter break in southern Sweden, which always happens in week 8 — no matter the weather. The predictability of it, the way everyone’s rest is dictated by a single calendar week, always struck me as strangely authoritarian. The “skiing break” sometimes arrives when there’s not a snowflake in sight. That frustration led to a simple question: what if the world itself decided when the break should come?

From there, the story unfolded easily. Citywide Seasonal Breaks imagines a civic protocol for pausing, not according to the clock or the calendar, but in response to ecological events — the first snowfall or a surfable wave on the River Meanwhile. I wanted to see what would happen if a city truly took the rhythms of the world seriously. What if bureaucracy itself became attuned to the seasons, even reverent toward them?

Of course, in Chronoberg, the system is inevitably over-administered. The Bog Time Listeners, Celestial Timekeepers Guild, and Office of Unscheduled Encounters transform something as natural as snow or surf into a civic ritual of measurement and confirmation. The humor lies in that contradiction: a world where nature is bureaucratically verified, yet still allowed to lead. It’s both a satire of administrative culture and a love letter to the imaginative possibilities of civic coordination.

The story also echoes one of Chronoberg’s central themes — the negotiation between Unitarian and Plural temporal orders. The Seasonal Pause Protocols are an attempt to coordinate without standardizing, to find unity through rhythm rather than regulation. They suggest that a city’s social life could flow with its environment, not against it.

Writing it, I wanted to keep the tone light but the question serious: what if civic time were responsive, ecological, and poetic all at once? Could governance itself learn to listen — not just to citizens, but to snow, surf, and frogs?

In Chronoberg, even the weather has a bureaucracy. And perhaps that’s the most hopeful thing about it: that the city still waits — patiently, absurdly, beautifully — for the world to decide when it’s time to rest.

This companion text situates the Election Special within Chronoberg’s current pluralist era, capturing the moment when the long dominance of the Temporal Diversity League begins to face renewed contestation.

Keri Facer and Johannes Stripple

The Election Special was written to bring politics back to the center of Chronoberg. After developing The History of Chronoberg – Between Unitarianism and Pluralism, we wanted to explore what it would feel like to inhabit the city today — in an era where the Temporal Diversity League (TDL) has long been in power, their ideas woven deeply into everyday life. Temporal pluralism, once radical, has become the norm. Yet, as so often happens, what was once liberatory is now under question.

This article captures that moment of unease — when a society built on pluralism begins to wonder whether too much flexibility, openness, and decentralization might have their own costs. Chronoberg’s citizens, long accustomed to living without shared timetables, are starting to ask difficult questions: Can the city still coordinate effectively? Has diversity become disarray? Is there a tyranny of structurelessness emerging within the pluralist dream?

The speculative history provided the scaffolding for this political landscape. Across its five eras, Chronoberg has swung between Unitarianism — the drive for synchronization, collective planning, and common rhythms — and Pluralism, with its embrace of emergent, locally grounded, and multispecies times. The Election Special brings that historical dynamic into the contemporary moment. It imagines what democratic deliberation might look like in a society still shaped by the legacies of both traditions.

Each of the five questions in the article stems from that interplay. The debate about climate change reveals a new anxiety over urgency and coordination — the “time of CO₂ atoms” challenging Chronoberg’s slower, more situated politics. Disputes over history, biological age, and the National Time Council show how pluralist ideals now collide with calls for structure, protection, and fairness. Even the seemingly technical issue of synchronization with the outside world evokes the old tension between independence and integration — a modern echo of the colonial past.

Writing this piece was also a way to ground the Chronoberg Chronicle in its political present. We wanted to show that Chronoberg is not a tranquil post-temporal utopia, but a democracy alive with friction and negotiation. The citizens’ assemblies, the rising New Internationalists, the protests, and the uncertainty around the NTC all express a society wrestling with its own success: how to preserve diversity without losing coherence, and how to coordinate without domination.

For us, the Election Special marks the beginning of Chronoberg’s new phase — an age of reflection and recalibration. The question is no longer whether the city can move beyond the clock, but whether it can live with the multiplicity it has created.

This companion text traces how the idea of Chronoberg’s pluralist festival emerged from the Crafting Chronoberg workshop, beginning with participants’ wish for the city to be a place of joy as well as contestation.

Johannes Stripple, Keri Facer, and Harriet Hand

The Many Moment Festival began with a simple but profound wish voiced during the Crafting Chronoberg workshop: Chronoberg should be a city people want to live in. Participants reminded us that contesting time could not only be about critique and struggle — it also had to make room for joy, spontaneity, and the shared pleasures of being out of step together. That provocation became the starting point for what would eventually become Chronoberg’s most dissonant and beloved celebration.

From there, we began to imagine what a festival might look like in a city where time is plural, relational, and collectively negotiated. Many real-world festivals are tightly scheduled, their success depending on precision and coordination. But what would happen if a city refused that logic? How could celebration unfold without countdowns, timetables, or fixed beginnings?

Those questions led to the Many Moment Festival — or MaMo, as people in Chronoberg call it. We pictured it as an event that doesn’t start all at once, but ripples through the city in waves, pauses, and convergences. A civic ritual of drift. A time when Chronoberg’s districts — the Intertidal, Octopus Barrio, the Clocktower District — each follow their own rhythm, yet somehow find connection in dissonance.

Writing the article, we wanted to evoke the gentle anarchy of that idea: the Time Commons picnic that begins “when enough people wander by,” the Slow Time Feast that has “no fixed courses,” and the bells that ring not to synchronize the city but to open “windows of togetherness.” The familiar institutions of Chronoberg — the Time Office and the Office of Unscheduled Encounters — make cameo appearances, performing their usual balancing act between coordination and freedom.

For us, MaMo became the joyful counterpart to the more explicitly political stories in the Chronoberg Chronicle. If the Election Special explored democracy through deliberation, the Many Moment Festival expresses it through shared experience. It reminds us that Chronoberg’s temporal politics are not only fought in assemblies and policies, but lived through music, ritual, and the unplanned gatherings that make life in the city worth living.

This companion text reflects on how a speculative interview between heeten bhagat and Michelle Bastian gave rise to Chronoberg’s concept of legally recognized temporalities.

heeten bhagat

The Eight Types of Justiciable Time article grew out of a speculative exercise that began during one of the Crafting Chronoberg workshops. We had been exploring how Chronoberg’s courts might operate in a city where time itself is plural. Drawing inspiration from Bronwen Morgan’s research on how legal systems are structured and the temporal assumptions they rely on, we began to ask: what would it mean to develop a court system capable of recognizing multiple temporalities — to make time itself justiciable?

From that discussion, heeten bhagat carried the idea forward. He approached Michelle Bastian, treating her not as a workshop participant but as if she were an expert witness from within the world of Chronoberg — the renowned horologist Harmony Suchcitz. Conducting the conversation as an in-character interview, heeten asked her to explain what kinds of time could be recognized in law and how such a system might function.

The exchange became a speculative act of co-creation. Michelle responded as Harmony would, outlining a set of legally valid temporalities — Crip Time, Narrative Time, Technological Time, Bog Standard Time, Spiral Time, and others — each representing a different way of living and sensing time. But the deeper insight was not in any single example; it was in the proliferation itself. Once Chronoberg took pluralism seriously, the question was no longer which times to recognize but how many, and how they might coexist within the same legal frame.

heeten’s first draft preserved the feel of a found document — an archival interview from Chronoberg’s early, experimental years. Its tone hovers between philosophy, journalism, and gentle satire, revealing both the promise and the chaos of institutionalizing temporal diversity. The interviewer’s bemusement mirrors the reader’s own as the conversation spirals outward, multiplying possibilities faster than they can be contained.

In the end, the piece captures a central paradox of Chronoberg’s political life: that the more earnestly the city seeks to honor temporal difference, the more complex its governance becomes. The article’s power lies not in the eight categories themselves, but in the recognition that there will always be many more.

This companion text reflects on the lived contradictions that inspired the author’s short story in The Chronoberg Chronicle—a meditation on Indigenous womanhood, time, and the tensions between academic and community life.

Catherine Dussault

This short story was written with a deep awareness of the intersectionality of oppressions and the diverse, often conflicting experiences of Indigenous women. As I wrote, I was thinking about the many expectations, roles, and impressions that Indigenous women must navigate—not only as women in a broad social sense but within the specific cultural, familial, and colonial contexts they inhabit. For instance, they may be expected to excel professionally, while also embodying traditional roles such as being a skilled seamstress, a dancer, a caregiver, and a mother. These roles are not always compatible; in fact, they often come into tension with one another in contemporary life.

With this in mind, I wanted the story to express something deeply personal—something I carry as an Indigenous scholar and that I know resonates with many other Indigenous people: what I call the contradiction of temporalities. Every hour I dedicate to academic work is time not spent in my community. When I teach or conduct research, I am often far from my hometown, or away from Nunavik, where I work and where my relationships are rooted. Academic success, framed within Western institutional structures, often comes at the cost of presence and nurturing of relationships. It can feel like an impossible trade-off—to be recognized in one world is to risk erasure in the other.

This is why I wanted my character to experience a sense of imbalance—to feel as though she is constantly falling short, unable to fully become the person she believes herself to be or wishes to become. The sense of failure is not personal weakness; it reflects the structural contradictions she lives within.

However, despite the apparent weight of structural pressures, I wanted to highlight the inherent subjectivity of both my character and myself as the writer. At the end of the story, I also chose to introduce my own voice, distinct from the anonymous character I had been writing about. That person had to stay, I felt, anonymous in order to represent the silencing of Indigenous women but also to make it more relatable to oneself. I wanted to underscore the fact that, while our experiences may echo each other, they are not identical. There are still inequalities between us. The voice of the narrator—in that case, my voice—holds the power to name, to define, to interpret. That act of writing is never neutral. It is always shaped by the position and privileges of the one who writes. I wanted to make that visible: that even as we try to tell others’ stories with care, those stories are always mediated through our own lenses, our own lives.

This companion text links the Chronicle’s travelogue to research on urban mobility, temporal justice, and the lived experience of waiting in African cities.

Zarina Patel

This piece is inspired by research that re-thinks the role of time in shaping just transitions in African cities. As an urban geographer, I have had a long-standing interest in the unequal spatial distribution of resources — who has access to what, and where. It is the poor who are consistently placed at the peripheries in accessing urban services, infrastructures, and benefits. Similarly, when adding a temporal lens, it is the poor who are left waiting.

We use urban mobilities as the entry point through which we bring space and time together to pay closer attention to the relationship between transport and the injustices of the persistent spatial legacy of postcolonial and post-apartheid cities. Our enquiry juxtaposes the framings of time in SDG 11.2 (affordable and sustainable transport systems) with that of everyday urban dwellers’ experiences of time as they commute across the City of Cape Town.

The disjunctures between universalised global and African local framings and experiences spotlight the coexistence of logics that occupy what appear to be parallel universes. The language of efficiency and the focus on public transport as an urban transport solution are contrasted with logics of time that are relational, contingent, and uncertain. The language of the local everyday captures this uncertainty through the imprecise measures of time expressed in colloquialisms such as now now, just now, and pole pole.

The evidence of these vastly different realities inspired the story presented in The Chronoberg Chronicle. The travels of Conejo Blanco and Ms A. Light are used to illustrate these two different logics. They arrive in Chronoberg infused with universalised notions of time and punctuality. The relationship between time and space is tightly held in their early days, resulting in high levels of anxiety. With time, however, they learn in this new space to let go of these rigid notions. As they loosen up, we see them observing more, engaging more, and becoming more settled and calmer.

While the travels of Blanco and Ms Light illustrate different logics, their stories also show that it is possible to transition between these framings — and that these temporal orientations have a profound qualitative effect on how urban dwellers experience everyday life.

This companion text trace how the idea of a Prefigurative Court emerged to explore justice across plural temporalities and the possibilities of law attuned to time.

Bronwen Morgan 

As the only (socio)legal scholar in the team, and one who overtly de-emphasises the centrality of courts in my teaching within a law school, I experienced a slowly growing realization across the project’s life about how much courts matter, despite their statistically minute salience in everyday life. The process and idea of what a court does has profound symbolic value for positive forms of legitimacy and ideology that help forge social bonds. The fascination of so many with courts matters: courts operate at the intersection of law and justice, so frequently falling short of enacting justice, yet shaping their practices around diverse ideals of justice: fairness, power and values. 

Reflecting on the many conversations about the relationship between time and justice that the program has catalysed, I decided to extend the imaginary of my fieldwork (focused on the citizen-policy interface in local government) into the arena of courts in the fictional Chronoberg. Standing in front of the visual map of the city on the day we created it, musing on the eastern section of waterlogged lands, perhaps wetlands, that were impossible to build on, I seized on the gift I had received that morning of a tiny elephant. Placing it in this inaccessible (to humans) land within Chronoberg, as an anomalous non-human being surrounded by displaced human refugees flooding into the wetlands, I thought of all the tensions likely to arise between the multiple beings seeking home and a place to live and thrive in years to come. How might a court attentive to temporal diversity intervene? Could justice ever prevail? What would the granular practice look and feel like? So was born the Prefigurative Court.

The key tension for the Court to grapple with was whether it was possible for the concept of prefigurative legality to figure into formal court processes. When people use the language, form, and legitimacy of law to imagine law otherwise, it is typically through various kinds of direct action rather than primarily through formal dispute resolution. However, if a judge were to consciously respond to plural conceptions of time, a court might simultaneously function as a formal institution and a site of prefigurative practice. Centring this tension led us to articulate eight forms of justiciable time, drawing on the scholarship and collaborations established in the programme. We then imported key examples of these different aspects of temporality into a narrative about disputed occupation of the Chronoberg wetlands. 

The narrative directly connects with my broader interest in appreciating the plurality of how law can manifest in collective lives, particularly its capacity to support both resistance and rebuilding. Resistance and rebuilding are both critical aspects of justice, for justice necessitates resistance; yet if struggle does not generate new lines of thought, traces of new worlds, or even simply open cracks that illuminate possibilities, then justice will never emerge. And when diverse temporalities are at stake, this point applies in ways that are more difficult to excavate then we can possibly imagine. Taking the first step here will make the elephant in the room (time) visible, piece by piece just as in the famous puzzle. Should we begin with the trunk? The toenails? The tail? Or perhaps the folded leathery nether regions that rarely see the light of day, but emerge engrained with muddy water from the playful exaltation of thriving in those wetlands, long ago and far away before the humans came.

These companion texts offer a spatial and conceptual backdrop that inspired several Chronicle articles related to water, bioregions, and pluriversal urbanism.

Tales and Times of the City of Cali and Its Surrounding BioregionTapestry of Transitioners of the Cauca River Valley

Arturo Escobar (with Diana A. Bernal, Maria Campo, Olga Eusse & Carlos Rodríguez Aristizábal)

This contribution to The Chronoberg Chronicle is based on a collective transition design project under way since 2018 in the southernmost part of the Upper Cauca River Valley in Colombia, anchored in the city of Cali (2.5 million) and its surrounding semi-urban and rural communities. We place the city—theoretically, methodologically and politically—within the larger bioregion within which (unwittingly and unwillingly) it exists. This is essential because the bioregional context conditions much of what the city is, including its timeframes and rhythms; its racial, ethnic and class multiplicity; and its more-than-human dimensions. Our goal is to create collective narratives, tools, and methodologies that enable diverse social groups to open paths for just ecosocial transitions towards non-destructive, peaceful, and pluriversal forms of dwelling. We see cities as complex entanglements of narratives, ontologies, infrastructures, designs, and practices within larger geopolitical contexts. We find that the “meso” level is particularly fertile for reconceiving the city in bioregional terms.

The Upper Cauca geographic valley is an extensive plain nestled between two chains of the Andean cordilleras, crossed by abundant water sources. It has been profoundly shaped by development models based on sugar cane monoculture, extensive cattle raising, and agro-industrial development, with disastrous effects on the ecosystems and the Black, Indigenous, and peasant communities. The project’s architecture includes three territorial nodes (urban and rural), predominantly Afrodescendant; three co-design axes (productive transformations, eco-ontological restoration, and historical reparations); three collaboratories (for transition thought and design, transition narratives, and critical cartographies and territorial design); actions along five threads (food sovereignty, water, justice, climate change, and territorial ordering); and at the moment nineteen grassroots transformative alternatives along these threads. We see this architecture as conducive to the convergence of transformative alternatives and the slow but sustained emergence of an agropolitan, acuapolitan, and multipolitan bioregion with an identity as a pluriversal territory of water.

We call our transition design approach ontological because ultimately the designing force is the worldview or ontology predominant in modern societies—patriarchal, capitalist, racist, individualizing, and delocalizing—embedded in globalization and “development.” We rely on visionación and disoñación (“visioning” and “dream-designing”) to facilitate the re/emergence of relational cosmovisions oriented towards pluriversal territorial peace with racial, social, spatial, environmental, and epistemic justice. Ultimately, we aim to promote conversations about other possible futures for the bioregion and networks among diverse actors, capable of reformulating institutional policies and activating regional mobilizations centered on the healing, care, and reconstruction of the web of life.

Project practices involve collective encounters and participatory workshops intended to develop competencies in grassroots communications (community radio, podcast, video and transmedia), critical cartography, transition and territorial designing, and training in particular areas such as food sovereignty, community gardens, and racial, gender, diversity, and epistemic justice. Many of these practices are part of the One Cauca River, Many Worlds campaign. Our group is composed of about sixty people, the majority of whom are Afrodescendant activists from the territorial nodes, plus a handful of professionals and academics.

Those interested in learning more about our project, please visit the project’s website and social media (largely in Spanish) and the book chapter listed below:https://www.unriocauca.com/https://www.instagram.com/unriocaucamuchosmundos/https://www.facebook.com/unriocaucamuchosmundoshttp://www.youtube.com/@unriocaucamuchosmundos

Reference

Diana A. Bernal, Maria Campo, Arturo Escobar, Olga Eusse, and Carlos Rodríguez Aristizábal, with the Tapestry of Transitioners of the Upper Cauca Valley One Cauca River, “One Cauca River, Many Worlds: Transitioning Towards Pluriversal Territorial Peace.” In Postcarbon Futures: Imagining (and Enacting) New Worlds through Transition Studies,edited by Anna Willow and Bürge Abiral (Routledge, in press).

Embodied Waters: The Memories, Knowledge, and Practices of Wayuu Women in Energy Transition Contexts in Colombia

Astrid Ulloa and Jazmin Romero-Epiayu

Our process of research is taking place in La Guajira, where different corporations will implement fifty-seven wind parks comprising 2,833 turbines on Wayúu people’s territory. These wind-park projects will involve infrastructure that will be embedded in the territory for more than thirty years, affecting waterways and generating greater demand for water. The community of Luace is set to receive one hundred wind turbines, which will transform its relationship with non-humans.

In this context, we were asking about the implications of the energy transition on the Luace community, particularly regarding how wind parks affect the Wayúu people’s relationship with water and the cultural practices surrounding it.

For the Wayúu, the relationship with water goes beyond infrastructure or availability; it is an embodied and embedded relationship with the territory. For them, water is a living entity with agency that follows its own pathways. Wayúu men and women relate to water through dreams, daily practices, and rituals. The Wayúu people have a close connection with water through various rituals, including those that call upon Juya’a (rain) and those that harmonize specific water sources. Communication with spiritual beings takes place through Läpü (dreaming), and rituals are prepared to honor water.

All water sources—or whatever “water” means to the Wayúu—have a Jülaulajanaa wüin or wülopü, the spiritual guardians of rivers, streams, and creeks. These spirits are ancestors who can take various forms. In the Jagueyes (surface water reservoirs), for example, there is the Pülowi of water, a pure being. In other water sources, there may be other beings, such as birds or animals. Through dreams, Wayúu people learn where water is located, but the spirit also reveals what they must do through Ayanamaya’a (collective work).

However, Wayúu women consider that wind parks are generating ontological, epistemic, and cultural violence. They make other ontologies visible by highlighting the relationships between bodies, territory, and water—relationships based on the interdependence of humans and non-humans. At the same time, they center their life politics from plural perspectives. Their proposals and political actions around the defense of body-territory-water position the defense of life through their memories, knowledge, and practices. This has led to demands for relational water justice.

These research processes contribute to an understanding of the complex relationship between the Wayúu people, especially women, and water. However, extractive processes and project implementations ignore the Wayúu’s ontology and epistemology, which establish their relationship with the territory and living beings.

Jasmin Romero Epiayu is Wayuu leader and director of the Wayuu Feminist Movement Organisation for Girls and Women (Organización Movimiento Feminista de Niñas y Mujeres Wayuu-MFNMW).

Reference

Ulloa, Astrid and Romero Epiayu, Jasmin. 2026. Aguas encarnadas: memorias, conocimientos y prácticas de las mujeres wayuu en contextos de transición energética, Colombia. Agua y Territorio / Water and Landscape. DOI 10.17561/at.32.9614