berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Introduction: Theorising Media and Time
Birgit Bräuchler and Nina Grønlykke Mollerup

Section 1: Time regimes

Chapter 1. Communalizing the future: Indigenous media and their expansion of calendar time across the US-Mexican border
Ingrid Kummels

Chapter 2. Temporal (de)hierarchizations: Modernist tropes and Islamic media practices
Martin Slama

Section 2: Presentism & beyond

Chapter 3. From presentism to long time: The new regime of historicity caught between the Anthropocene and longtermism
Olivier Driessens

Chapter 4. Working in the never-ending now: Presentism in digital journalism
Gudrun Rudningen

Section 3: Crisis temporalities

Chapter 5. Media, time and polycrisis in a hybrid media world
Birgit Bräuchler and John Postill

Chapter 6. Polymedia and the remediation of an Iranian conflictual past: An exile photo archive as a form of resistance
Catherine Bubatzky

Section 4: Archiving temporalities

Chapter 7. The affect of media-time: Reflections from a socio-cultural anthropologist in audio-visual archives in contemporary Cairo
Ali Atef

Chapter 8. Entangled archives and infrastructures: Tracing and reconstructing sociotechnical histories, biographies, and digital sovereignty in Northwestern Ontario, Canada
Philipp Budka

Section 5: Algorithmic time

Chapter 9. Colonizing digital time: A study of users’ temporal experience on digital platforms
Ricardo Pronzato

Chapter 10. Can the worker-as-platform-user flex?
Simiran Lalvani

Afterword: Untimely Mediation
Ann Rigney

Bibliography
Index

Theorising Media and Time

Temporalities, Media Practices and Politics of Time in a Digital Era

Edited by Nina Grønlykke Mollerup and Birgit Bräuchler

Afterword by Ann Rigney

294 pages, 12 figs, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-83695-681-5 Hb Published (September 2026)

web ISBN 978-1-83695-680-8

Details

The book offers an in-depth examination of the entanglements of media and time. A significant contribution of the edited volume is the multiplicity of contributions and perspectives exploring how time regimes and pressures affect people from different parts of the world. Alica Repenning, Institute for Geography and Geology

Digital media permeate every aspect of our lives, including our temporal perceptions. Time and attention have become one of the most precious resources, for users as well as corporate business. This book sheds light on these critical connections and how they influence not only our daily lives, but also how they exist in emerging power structures. It brings advances in the anthropological thinking about time into conversation with theorisations of media to develop an understanding of how media and time affect each other while keeping human experiences at the heart of the conversation.

Nina Grønlykke Mollerup is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research investigates how images of violence are produced and how they are used to establish truths and narratives by following shifting understandings of images over time, particularly in relation to human rights and justice.

Birgit Bräuchler is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is author of Cyberidentities at War (2013, Berghahn), The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015, Palgrave), editor of Reconciling Indonesia (2009, Routledge), co-editor of Theorising Media and Conflict (2020, Berghahn) with Philipp Budka and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.

Series: Volume 13, Anthropology of Media

Subject: Anthropology (General) Sociology Sociology

Area:

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC052000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Media Studies; SOC026040 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Social Theory