Lives and time

An Inaugural Professorial Lecture This lecture addresses lives and time: the ways in which people live their lives as journeys in time and the ways in which their lives are shaped by time. Social scientists currently place emphasis on the ways in which individuals are complicit in constituting and reconstituting their lives. Professor Julia Brannen balances this with a focus on the sociological dilemma of the inter-relationship of agency and structure. Professor Brannen discusses the pluralities of concepts of time and identifies three in particular: present time, life course time and time framed by historical events and periods. She argues that changes in society, patterns of working and family lives mean that our experience of time has not remained the same. Looking to the future, she suggests, we need to consider not only how we can make time, but how we give new value to time. To do this we need to be conscious of how time makes us.