The politics of time with Carolyn Smith

“I was working at an NGO in Venice when I realised that I didn’t want to go into architectural practice. I actually found this PhD on LinkedIn as a fully funded studentship opportunity.” 

Carolyn, who had been living and working in Venice after completing her MPhil in Architecture at Cambridge, applied for the PhD in Geography and was accepted in 2020, teaching herself Spanish as she went.

For the ethnographic study that forms the core of her PhD research, Carolyn spent nine months living with the Indigenous Mapuche and Pewenche communities, who live with the Copahue volcano. The persistently active volcano straddles the Chile-Argentina border, and Carolyn’s research looks at the power dynamics associated with volcanic risk, in the context of time and rhythm. 

“This theme kept coming up in the data: the politics of time, which is not something that people talk about enough in Geography—it’s a spatial discipline, and we can’t map time. Our institutionalised (abstract) notion of time does not map on semi-nomadic goat herders.”

“In Chile if you die from a natural disaster, the state is culpable—it’s deemed to be their fault—but if you die from poverty, it’s not. It’s just an accepted fact of life. The politics emerge when we start to question some of these common sense assumptions around what we deem ‘acceptable’ in society. The Pewenche community I work with is incredibly politically savvy—and while they might not use complex academic terminology to describe these things, they feel them acutely. They are extremely marginalised and argue that they’re dying of poverty every day, but the government doesn’t care about them. So when the volcano erupts, they refuse to evacuate. The State suddenly cares if they live or die and there is agency in the delay. It’s not a question of ‘risk perception’: they’re wagering their lives against the urgency of risk-based discourses to push for recognition now that they’re suddenly visible to the State.”

Carolyn will be presenting her research at this year’s Wolfson Research Event (WRE), the College’s annual interdisciplinary and student-led academic conference. This year’s WRE will run from 2-3 May and is open to all. Carolyn will speak about how she uses rhythm as an epistemological framework for understanding the Mapuche and Pewenche communities’ relationship to Copahue, as well as to geography and to time.

“I found that there was a conflict between embodied and abstracted understanding—namely, what it means to inhabit a land as a mobile community. In Argentina, for example, they’ve developed a transhumant school that follows the kids based on their seasonal migration patterns. Their lifestyle is very seasonal, so the straight up application of science doesn’t apply, and rhythm creates space for the agency of non-human others: goats, or the volcano, or even the weather. Rhythm allows us to work out how we can engage and phrase the questions that we need to ask to make change. The Mapuche and Pewenche communities speak a lot about energy and process and flow—things don’t always translate into Spanish, so rhythm is an intercultural concept that creates a middle ground, and also means that scientists aren’t speaking down to them. It’s a more collaborative concept.” 

And for Carolyn, part of the draw of the WRE is the opportunity for collaboration. 

 “These things really give you energy: getting ideas from other areas and having the chance to see what’s happening in the College. I was the Covid cohort so I don’t know that many people, and I chose Wolfson because it has a reputation of being relaxed and diverse, so to do the WRE this year is really exciting.”

For more details about this year’s programme, head to the event page.