fields

Two Rooms, Two Temporalities

Two events at RMIT over the past couple of weeks revisited the temporal challenges at the heart of how we think about planetary futures.

The launch of Energy@RMIT led by A/Prof Anne Kallies and Calum Drummond AO brought together 200 researchers spanning engineering, economics, law and social science around a shared challenge: how to make energy transition work in practice. Guest speaker Victoria Mollard, from the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), presented their strategic framework, that offered an unusually designerly framing that explained how their decisions were made at pace, in conditions of deep uncertainty, and relied upon imagination (perhaps futuring) to reach viable policy. And yet the temporal frame remained resolutely market-scaled.

A Different Measure of Time
Days earlier, the launch of the Post-Human Convergences book opened with N’Arwee’t Professor Carolyn Briggs AM speaking of the deep knowledge measured not in policy cycles but in millions of years of landscape. Knowledge carrying the responsibility of continuation across generations. A completely different relationship to time and to transition.
Rosi Braidotti, described learning to become an ancestor, relinquishing, allowing what was ignited in the past to be projected into the future by others. The humanities, she argued, might now function as safeguarding the margins of that which is not accounted for – protecting that which cannot be quantified, the weirdness that neither markets can replicate.

What Imagination Actually Requires
Victoria Mollard’s appeal to imagination was genuine – but imagination bounded by market objectives and regulatory timescales is a particular kind of imagination. The posthumanism book launch offered a different definition entirely: transdisciplinarity not as a method for generating implementable solutions, but as a practice of remaining open to deeper questions, unexpected outcomes, and the productive clash of knowledges that leaves linearity far behind.

The book launch proposed decolonise, decarbonise, decapitalise as deliberately entangled imperatives, not sequential challenges but convergences that reshape each other. Energy@RMIT’s opening acknowledgment of First Nations energy insecurity as both injustice and opportunity hints at this entanglement. Both events held a space for imagination, but the question remains as to whether the temporal frames we work within are wide enough to hold it.

What would energy transition look like if imagination meant working with deep time, not just market time?

Posthuman Convergences: Transdisciplinary Methods and Practices

Editors: Goda Klumbytė, Emily Jones, Rosi Braidotti. Copyright Date: 2025 Published by: Edinburgh University Press

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.27710986