Night as Fragmenting Frontier: Understanding the Night that Remains in an era of 24/7

Abstract

Social scientists have previously understood the night through a frontier metaphor. This has pitched night as an empty or lightly inhabited space into which the urban, capitalist day has been expanding. The contemporary increase in nocturnal research has complicated this picture, showing an increasing multiplicity of complexly lived, structured and experienced nights across the globe. This paper looks to retrieve the concept of night as frontier by drawing on postcolonial theories to generate a more subtle conceptualisation of 'frontier', while also arguing that recent research reveals that this frontier is now fragmenting. By exploring research into a series of core themesartificial light at night and darkness; night-lives; and global nights -I then explore what such an understanding of night allows us to say about current research. As nocturnal social science continues to mature, a more critical eye will need to be paid to the complexity of shifting power relations and identities within this fragmenting nocturnal frontier.

Illuminating austerity: Lighting poverty as an agent and signifier of the Greek crisis

“…It is in the midst of these multiple conceptual lacunae that I locate the contribution of my study. Echoing Shaw’s call ‘to establish whether the darkness that remains in the face of expanding capitalism is a darkness that leaves certain people behind’ ( Shaw, 2015 : 641), I seek to understand how the constructions of austerity and crisis are bound with both the experience and threat of light deprivation – from the micro-spaces of the home to the nationwide spectre of blackouts.…”

Chronotopes of urban centralities: Looking for prominent urban times and places

“…5.3 | The prominence of times and places on the divide between day and night Paraphrasing Melbin (1978), the chronotope covering the times and places of urban late afternoon and evening occurs metaphorically in a frontier timespace separating the daytime from nighttime. However, as Shaw (2015) notes, this boundary between day and night is in fact not so clear-cut; the onset of night is a gradual and fragmented process. The transition between the light and dark parts of the urban day also implies a transition between work and non-work activities.…”

Continuous Production and New Forms of Labour: A Case for Reclaiming Public Time

“…A number of disciplines and perspectives are represented in existing literature. These include (among many others) studies on the urban hardware of information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Graham, 2001), the night-time city (Eldridge, 2019; Dimmer, Solomon, & Morris, 2017; Shaw, 2015, 2018; Tadié & Permanadeli, 2015; Thomas & Bromley, 2000; Lovatt & O’Connor, 1995), social impacts of mobile technologies (Hampton, Goulet, & Albanesius, 2015; Paiva, Cachinho, & Barata-Salgueiro, 2017; Hatuka & Toch, 2016; Green, 2002; Townsend, 2000), the relationship between time, space and community (Stephens, 2010; McCann, 2003; Calhoun, 1998) and spatial effects of temporal politics (Kitchin, 2019; Charbgoo & Mareggi, 2018; Moore-Cherry & Bonnin, 2018; Mulíček and Osman, 2018; Simone & Fauzan, 2013; Stavrides, 2013). These scholars have examined in great depth the processes through which social and political forces contest the meaning of time and act upon it—causing it to be compressed, sped up, broken, divided into fractions, reorganized as rhythms, appropriated, revalourized and invoked strategically.…”