What might it mean for time to be felt or embodied? How can the study of time help us understand complex lived experiences such as ageing, illness, incarceration or displacement?
These were just some of the questions explored at Touching Time: Duration, Bodies, Politics – a two-day international symposium co-organised by Dr Jessie Stanier, Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE Bristol, with the British Society for Phenomenology (BSP) and partners in the Netherlands. Held on 23–24 June 2025, the event welcomed nearly 70 in-person and online participants.
The symposium brought together interdisciplinary thinkers to explore how time is experienced, shaped, disrupted, or resisted – through bodies, relationships, institutions, and creative practice.
Event highlights
- An opening exercise using a strand of red yarn to explore tension, connection, and collective time
- Two interactive workshops featuring kinetic sculpture and creative writing
- A closing dance performance, developed and performed during the symposium
- Panels and keynotes covering topics such as: affect and ageing across the life course; colonialism, memory and displacement; chrononormativity and care; psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and politics of time.
Touching Time: Duration, Bodies, Politics
The event drew together 2 keynote speakers – Prof Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck, University of London) and Dr David Ventura (Newcastle University) – and 10 panel speakers, bridging philosophical phenomenology with other intellectual traditions including aesthetics, psychosocial theory, anthropology, queer theory, affect studies, and literary analysis.
About the symposium
The Touching Time symposium is part of the BSP’s International Symposium series, an annual event spotlighting innovative phenomenological research around the world. Jessie Stanier has chaired these events since 2022.
This year’s event was co-sponsored by the Department of Culture Studies at Tilburg University and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, making participation free for all delegates.
It also builds on a growing relationship between UWE Bristol and the BSP. UWE hosted the BSP’s annual conference on Frenchay Campus last year – part of wider efforts to foster international dialogue and raise the profile of UWE’s philosophy research.