The workshop is part of the Thematic Einstein Forum “Scales of Temporality: Modeling Time and Predictability in the Literary and the Mathematical Sciences”. The forum is organised within the framework of the Berlin Mathematics Research Center MATH+ in collaboration with EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities” and supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.

After a semester of interdisciplinary exchange and debate on the various scales, models, and concepts of temporality, the Thematic Einstein Forum “Scales of Temporality” would like to reflect on the findings and on future challenges in a closing workshop. In order to do so, we want to shift our focus from the abstract and theoretical discussion to the pressing matters of our time; how can we relate mathematical and philological research and theory to the current political, social, and environmental experiences of crisis of our times? Namely, what can the mathematical sciences and literary studies contribute to the historical and political notion of “Zeitenwende(n)”? One year after the invasion of Russia into Ukraine and during the ongoing warfare, the term coined prominently by German chancellor Scholz addresses the mode of time that might escape its theoretical conceptualization, as it connects a historiographical and political perspective of a non-foreseen shift in the state of affairs with the experience of our times as tumultuous and uncertain. How can the models we discussed in works of literature, in calculations on probability, in the description of evolutionary processes and in the perception of time in philosophy help us to understand, analyze and re-narrate political and social changes? How can models such as tragic peripety or the reversal effects in tipping points be applied to clarify our description of the times of experience and of possible courses of action? How do mathematical and literary models apply to the Anthropocene, to climate change, to intergenerational responsibility or to the ongoing processes of globalization, circulation of goods and of migration?

Programme

10:00 – 11:00 | Simon Godart (Freie Universität Berlin / EXC 2020): “Zeitenwende as Peripeteia?”

11:00 –  11:30 | Coffee Break 

11:30 –  12:30 | Eva Axer (ZfL Berlin): “Diverging Temporalities and the Question of Change. On ‘Model Thinking’ in Literary Theory (C. Levine) and Climate Fiction (R. Powers, KS Robinson)”

12:30 – 14:00 | Lunch Break 

14:00 – 15:00 | Anders Levemann (Universität Potsdam / Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung): “The folding of the world: infinite growth on a finite planet”

15:00 – 15:30 | Coffee break

15:30 – 16:30 | Friederike Schäfer (Freie Universität Berlin / EXC 2020): “A brief traversal through scales that pertain to the Anthropocene—via 5 objects & 5 scenes“

16:30 | Closing Remarks 

The information about the closing workshop can also be found on the MATH+ website.