Return

In this moment, our gaze turns to the transformations and new challenges presented to us as we arrive at a “new beginning”— returning to a familiar place that has changed.  Where and how can our methods and findings best be used to improve the problems of our time? Long-standing political, sociocultural, and environmental problems persist in familiar and new forms even as new issues emerge, suffering the ongoing impacts of a global pandemic, systemic inequalities, and growing geopolitical instabilities. There has never been a more urgent need to rethink and reuse our conceptual tools to employ the social sciences to find solutions to pressing needs at all levels: local, regional, national, international, and global.

‘Return’ brings with it ideas of nostalgia and loss. It evokes something gone that needs to be retrieved while also calling for new futures to be created and potentialities that were lying dormant but are awakened. ‘Return’ is always a return-to and a return-from– it carries the weight of particular histories and possible trajectories in the interval it describes. Nietzsche wrote about eternal recurrence as a metaphysical system, a cosmological necessity; As a concept it opens ways to understand our present, by looking at how we got there and why. As we return to on-campus events and every day in-person interactions, how does the concept of returning– with its implied recurrences, repetitions, temporalities, and political implications– help us better understand our present moment? This question of what it means to return presents opportunities for integrating theory and practice for greater collaboration between professors, researchers, and professionals.

What sorts of ‘return(s)’ can there be? And what does each allow and/or foreclose? How does reconceptualization of the past best inform our current research practices? What sources and methodological approaches allow researchers to address the subjectivity of time and the interactions between social and institutional temporal regimes?