Diagramming Planetary Time: a Workshop
November 17, 2025
15 – 4:45 p.m.
Auerbach Library, MESH
Weyertal 59
50937 Köln
Information zur Veranstaltung
Registration needed (see below).
In all attempts to navigate a humane and equitable course through the major planetary issues of our time – climate change, great extinctions, planetary boundaries, tipping points, ecological resilience, disaster preparedness, and so on – specific conceptions of time play a crucial but often unexamined role. Yet as Barbara Adam (1990) argued, any adequate social theory should seek to grasp time directly, in all of time’s multiple aspects and manifestations. In this workshop we will examine and open up preconceptions about time in contemporary ecological thinking, critically examining the ‘viscourse’ or ‘visual discourse’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999) employed in representations of long-term human and planetary time, both past and future.
We will explore how conceptions of time in different cultures display both diversity and commonalities, including how they are shaped by the embodied experience of locomotion, manipulation and mark-making on two-dimensional surfaces. We will then sort different diagrams of planetary time – including those brought along by workshop participants – into different classes, discussing the implications of each – for example, vertical historical timelines with the past at the top flowing down toward the present; geological timelines with the deep past at the bottom building up to the present; Anthropocene-related timelines running from left to right marking major transitions in earth-system functioning; evolutionary diagrams that expand and branch from the centre outwards; diagrams with loops and spirals; diagrams of multiple futures from post-positivist futures studies, and so on.
We will collectively discuss the effects of different diagram choices, and how we might better employ visual representations of planetary change.
Readings (not obligatory):
Mitchell, Marilyn (2004) 'The visual representation of time in timelines, graphs, and charts', Refereed Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, Sydney. https://pure.bond.edu.au/ws/files/27740676/The_Visual_Representation_of_Time_in_Timelines_Graphs_and_Charts.pdf
Morphocode (n.d.) 'The representation of time in information design',https://morphocode.com/the-representation-of-time-in-information-design/
Register here: https://form.jotform.com/252863402285054
Veranstalter MESH
URL Veranstalter https://mesh.uni-koeln.de/events/meshworks/workshop-diagramming-planetary-time
Kontakt Jennifer Wasem
E-Mail jwasem1@uni-koeln.de