This article explores the temporalities experienced by persons aged 70 years and over during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Although the temporalities of the pandemic have been analysed from multiple perspectives, we contribute to this line of research in two ways. First, we show how deeply the pandemic affected older people's experiences of temporality. Second, we further develop the concept of forced present to highlight the consequences that the restriction measures had on older persons’ situations and perceptions of temporality. More specifically, we asked the following question: How did older people perceive time (past, present and future) during the pandemic? We used thematic analysis to examine a dataset consisting of written letters (N = 77) collected between April and June 2020. The findings showed that social isolation forced older people to live in the present without being able to plan their near future because they had no knowledge of when they would be ‘free’ again, which made some participants feel anxious and depressed. Furthermore, we found that the present became intertwined with the personal past as well as with the collective past, as evidenced by participants’ descriptions of war, previous pandemics and hardships. This article deepens our understanding of older people's everyday lives during the pandemic and highlights the problematic nature of social isolation of older people as a safety measure. Overall, this article reveals the particularity of older people's experiences in unequal pandemic times and the ageism inherent in the restriction measures.

Temporality is important for understanding Hong Kong's postcolonial status since its handover from Britain to China in 1997. This study examines the mediated regimes of postcolonial temporalities in coverage of five anniversaries of the Hong Kong handover (between 1998 and 2020) in Chinese and British newspapers. In 1998, the Chinese and British press shared a significant consensus regarding the “legitimate continuity” of Hong Kong's colonial legacies; however, this consensus was increasingly undermined by ideological contestations surrounding the city's postcolonial ruptures and differences. The multiple temporal claims that emerged in Chinese and British newspapers were systemized within a proposed framework that combined temporal modes (the “formal structures” of temporal relations) and ideological appraisals (the “general politics” where temporal modes are (il)legitimized and (ab)normalized). The temporal complexity concerning Hong Kong exemplifies the former colony's dilemmatic “in-betweenness” and temporal inconclusiveness, which create an open discursive space that invites ideological investments by powerful symbolic stakeholders.

In response to Sato and Sonoda's “Asian Studies ‘inside out’: research agenda for the development of Global Asian Studies,” members of the Global Asias Collaborative at Rutgers University – comprised of a diverse group of scholars of Asia and the Asian diaspora located in history, literature, art history, geography, among other disciplines – offer responses to this generative prompt to remap the place and field of “Asia” in its heterogeneous and interwoven temporalities and topologies.

Diplomats, officials, scientists and other actors working with the Antarctic Treaty System have not simply negotiated a range of measures for regulating human access to the region in a physical sense. They are also continually negotiating a cultural order, one in which time is central. Antarctic actors are aware that the Treaty did not once exist and may cease to exist sometime in the future. They are conscious of environmental change. Each actor tries to elevate their standing and power in the system by deploying temporal ideas and discourses in their interactions with each other: bringing their histories into negotiations, trying to control the idea of the future. This article will map three temporalities within Treaty history: first, the deployment and potency of histories and futures, their relative rhythms and lengths; second, permanence and expiration, the questions and politics of how long the Treaty should or might last; and third, the periodisation of the Treaty period, both among actors themselves and among scholars studying Antarctica.