Time & Society

2020, Vol. 29(1) 3–4

Editorial ! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X19896900
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Robert Hassan and Michelle Bastian

Barbara Adam, founding editor of Time & Society, wrote in her marvellous
2004 book Time: ‘We cannot understand time . . . through stories and the-
ories alone. Rather, we need also to look at practices and temporal rela-
tions, that is, our involvement with the world’ (p.71). How true. ‘Stories
and theories’ can seem to encompass a lot about life, and the more relaxed
among us might settle for this dualism. And, on the face of it, it does have a
lot going for it. Stories are of course ‘narratives’, the de rigueur term today
in media and politics as something to ‘own’ or to ‘shape’ or to ‘control’.
The politician and the political adviser can successfully manipulate an issue
or a problem if they can control the shape, content and direction of its
narrative. And the narrative form itself more broadly may encompass a
good deal in the psychic life of the individual. The literary scholar Barbara
Hardy (1968) saw narratives as deeply important, so much so that she was
compelled to write that ‘we dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative,
remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize,
construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative’ (p.5). And to draw
upon Adam’s concept once more, the narratives through which we live
and understand our lives, gain authentication—or perhaps invalidation—
through the theories we apply to them, consciously or unconsciously, tac-
itly or explicitly. However, and crucially in our age of misinformation, to
give these narratives the further test of practice, or praxis, is to bring ‘our
involvement with the world’ to realms of ‘stories and theories’ and to give
them a more concrete reality. Think of our current political failure to bring
the ‘stories and theories’ of global warming to a point of shared global
political will that would act decisively and immediately to drastically reduce
CO2 emissions. Our own subjective ‘involvement with [a] world’ of ever
more extreme wildfires, heatwaves, floods, droughts reminds us daily that
we must act, yet we cannot connect all the necessary elements with which to
embrace and ‘own’ our environmental past, present and future.
Temporality, of course, inhabits the worlds of stories, theories and prac-
tice. But it must do so simultaneously in order to derive the fullest possible
4 Time & Society 29(1)

‘feeling’ for the existence and understanding of time. The collection of

original manuscripts in our first issue for 2020 mirrors these combined
worlds. Architectural communities, academic migration, personal hygiene,
protest, race class and gender, technology and more speak to Barbara
Adam’s trilogy of theories, stories and practice that reflect both the crea-
tivity of the authors and the profundity of Adam’s insight.

References
Adam B (2004) Time. Cambridge: Polity.
Hardy B (1968) Towards a poetics of fiction: 3) An approach through narrative.
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 2(1): 5–14.