Dr. Felipe Torres

Felipe Torres is assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. He holds a PhD in Sociology at the Max Weber Centre, University of Erfurt (Germany) and he is member of the International Society for the Study of Time (ISST). His academic interests rely on acceleration theory, temporal socio-political concepts (utopia, progress, revolution), social theory and conceptual history. He authored Temporal Regimes: Materiality, Politics, Technology (Routledge, 2022) and edited the book Conceptos que hacen Historia(s). Estudios en torno a Reinhart Koselleck (Pólvora 2022). He has also written articles on social theory, history, and time studies in Time & Society, Isegoría, and Cinta de Moebio. 

In May 2023 he assumed as Editor-in-Chief of KronoScope. Journal for the Study of Time and during December he was granted with a third-party funding from the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo ANID-Chile (Chilean National Reserarch Agency), with a project on "Notions of Space and Time in Social Theory" (11240326) funded for three years (2024-2026). The project seeks to systematize the concepts of time and space in the history of social theory and to explore possible venues for innovative integrations of both. Finally, he joined the SFB Structural Change of Property Consortium subgroup on "Making things available: Ownership as an incarnation of our relationship with the world" in 2024 with a project on time and automation.

A picture of Dr. Felipe Torres.

Research project

The project seeks to inquiry the making of time as commodification in automation processes. Time, far from being an abstract dimension, is nowadays something more akin to a commodity, or even an asset, used to concretely measure the distribution of resources, risks, projections and balance sheets. Therefore, those processes turn time into a ‘thing’. From high-tech companies to states’ industries, they operate with clear estimates of machine time (expectancy, working hours, operativity), price definitions and policies (at what cost? for how long?), and forecasts and programs to face the new work scenarios (when? To what extent?). This leads to think on the materiality of time, with precise linkages in economic, political life, and the biological world, as well as the conceptual domains that contest a formal and abstract definition of the temporal dimension.

Activities

Publications

  • Torres, Felipe (2024): "Historical Time and Acceleration. A Constitutive Bond", In: International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 12: 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1163/22130624-20230012
  • Torres, Felipe (2023): “Teorizando la aceleración social. Crítica para la sociedad actual“, In: Revista de Sociología 38(1), 84-95. DOI: 10.5354/0719-529X.2023.71234.
  • Montero, D. & Torres, F. (2023): “Social Theory Today. A Conversation with Hartmut Rosa”, In: Revista de Sociología 38(1), 192–200. DOI: 10.5354/0719-529X.2023.71441.
  • Torres, F. & Gros, A. (2022): “Slowing Down Society? Theoretical Reflections on Social Deceleration in Pandemic Times (and Beyond)”, In: KronoScope 22 (1): 3-29. DOI: 10.1163/15685241-20221505.
  • Torres, Felipe (2022): Temporal Regimes: Materiality, Politics, Technology, Routledge: London.
  • Torres, Felipe (Hrsg.) (2022): Conceptos que hacen historia(s). A partir de Reinhart Koselleck, Editorial Pólvora: Santiago de Chile.

Subprojects

C06 Making things available: Ownership as an incarnation of our relationship with the world

Associate Member/ Fellow