Currently, various academic, intellectual, and political circles are discussing a temporary crisis, which some have characterized as an epochal or civilizational crisis. This era is marked by an environmental crisis in which climate change reminds us that the collision between the time of life and the time of nature leads to collapse and the loss of alternative futures. Therefore, we are at a point in history where past and future become blurred when it comes to guiding our present. It is a time of crisis for utopias, but also of questioning the frameworks of memory upon which definitions of collective identities are based, identities that guide our present encounters in shared practices. Short-termism in politics and economics, the absence of long-term social projects, as well as widespread pessimism about the future and the discrediting of experience, result in a present political action that seems focused on managing immediate needs.

Although essentially metropolitan, this diagnosis resonates with Latin American reality. What possible futures does the new wave of progressive governments in the region offer? What alternative future does our region offer in the face of global dystopias? How does the memory of our shared pasts connect us in present practices? What is the relevance of our pasts in the ways we imagine our shared future?

Those of us who propose the renewal of this Working Group recognize that our contemporary era is marked by a temporal crisis. But, at the same time, we recognize in the diagnosis outlined above a reading of reality that tends to obliterate other multiple realities. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the frameworks of thought of diverse communities, as well as the temporal orientations and political practices of various social movements and political projects, contribute other ways of conceptualizing time and articulating the past with the present, opening horizons of the future in which the future appears as a terrain to be contested and not necessarily as a verdict in which tomorrow no longer exists.

While we agree on the notion of a crisis of temporality as a defining element of our global contemporaneity, we believe it is the duty of critical thought to expose the structures of domination, revealing their contingency and, therefore, the paths and routes to alternative futures. This allows us to question the dominant vision of social reality and envision other possible realities, or, in Freirean terms, to go beyond limit situations to recognize what he calls the viable unprecedented (Freire 2011; 2012). In other words, faced with the shared diagnosis of a present that ignores its formative pasts and blocks alternative futures, we recognize the existence of multiple other alternatives that, from Latin America and the Caribbean, articulate other ways of thinking, speaking, and doing time. We believe that these temporal alternatives, both present and past, must be studied and established as possibilities with the potential to transform the present in relation to other possible futures.

This working group focuses on the study of time and temporalities from a Latin American perspective. We recognize time as a constitutive dimension of communal life that deserves to be reflected upon from different angles and under diverse considerations. Ultimately, the disputes over life, history, and possible futures are related to the ways in which we understand, conceptualize, and contest social and historical time. To control the time of others is to control their lives, frame their projects, and structure their trajectories (Auyero, 2013). The politics of time, or chronopolitics, from which the temporal regimes that guide communal life are defined, are also spaces of dispute because they define collective dispositions toward change and/or the continuity of systems of domination and exploitation. The opening or closing of future horizons is contested and seeks resolution within these chronopolitics.

Similarly, we recognize temporality as one of the central categories upon which social and cultural differences are constructed. We seek to explore how temporal relations are marked by complex entanglements between policies, practices, and temporal imaginaries that arise from a series of contexts: the homogenizing impact of globalized time, the long duration of coloniality, the persistence of Indigenous temporal cultures, and the crisis of modern futures. Temporality is not understood here as an objective fact nor as a category of human consciousness; rather, we conceive of it as a product of multiple practices and subjectivities that are expressed as political and cultural projects (Valencia, 2018). Hence, we propose to explore multiple temporalities, or what Latin American social theory has defined from various perspectives as variegated times, the time of the multisocietal, multitemporal heterogeneity, temporal entanglements, border and mestizo times, ch'ixi temporality, and so on. (Anzaldúa, 1987; Ávila, 2014; 2018; Canclini, 1989; Resende and Thies, 2017; Rivera, 2018; Tapia, 2002; Valencia, 2010; 2012; Zavaleta, 1977; 2008)

We seek to reflect on and study temporalities in three broad dimensions that will bring us closer to the multiple ways of thinking about, speaking about, and experiencing time in Latin America. The first of these refers to the study of temporality in the Latin American debate of ideas and in the production of its own social theory. In Latin America, time has been the warp and weft of social thought in its most diverse traditions and projects. Time appears most often explicitly, but it is also present in implicit forms, which is why it is necessary to unveil the discussion surrounding time that has taken place in our region when contesting the meaning of its history. Within this framework, it is necessary to propose dialogue exercises that enable the synthesis and organization of these discussions.

The second line of inquiry concerns the development of a counterfactual theory for the good life (Ramírez, 2022). If every social order implies a particular temporal order, then every utopia implies a unique counterfactual history. This line of research seeks to theorize about the concept of counterfactual history, which has emerged from democratic processes occurring in Latin America in the new millennium. Counterfactual history is understood as "no time," insofar as it implies a desired (and possible) social struggle that has been historically and geographically posed and that seeks to be achieved (the society of good living, living life to the fullest), for which a new temporal order must be constructed. This research begins with an analysis of specific historical struggles in the region that have sought to construct new utopias in order to investigate the temporalities inherent in such societal proposals. For the aforementioned concept of counterfactual history, historical revisionism and its narratives are important insofar as they serve to politically contest the desired utopia/counterfactual history. This line of research proposes to move towards the construction of an alternate history theory for the good life as a conceptual framework for critical/utopian analysis with a clear epistemic intention: to serve as a conceptual tool for exploring new alternate history futures that are currently being contested in the region. The discussion of alternate history theory will be a means to investigate a new theory of value centered on (good) lives, allowing for reflection, evaluation, and the formulation of guidelines for the construction of new theories of social justice. The research includes a debate on chronopolitics for the construction of other possible social alternate histories.

Finally, the third point refers to the ethnographic study of humble dreams (Contreras, 2022). These dreams, as situated notions of the future, draw from diverse, heterogeneous, and often incoherent horizons. They are futures that are temporally sedimented from dissimilar, often opposing, voices that intervene in the local construction of meaning. We can think of these interventions as conversations, around which local models are configured; in our case, models or ideas of imagining the future. These local conversations occur within the context of other dominant, structural, and general conversations. What is investigated at this point, then, are the local articulations with these central or dominant conversations, including the inscriptions of the past and the practices of the present, between the central text and the marginal voices. In this sense, the conversations that configure the local are made up of contact and what has been defined as the work of imagination that constructs the local from diverse articulations of ways of being, doing, and imagining reality. Humble dreams, which also emerge from people's capacity for reflection when evaluating their circumstances, constitute that local model of an imagined future. This model arises from diverse and historically situated conversations that construct meaning and enable people to imagine other possible lives and commit to them from the perspective of their present practices. These practices stem from the urgency of earning a living and, at the same time, make life and its continuity possible.