Racialized Time: Contestation at the Intersection of Biography and History

By: Dr. Collin Mueller

Abstract: The subjective experience of time is a central, yet understudied, dimension of how racialized social systems inequitably distribute material, emotional, and psychic resources and/or burdens to individuals and groups. I draw on findings from a team-based analysis of a large-scale qualitative interview study conducted in 2019 and 2020 to describe how racialized agency structures time as a resource and as a burden among Black, Latinx, and White Americans in the context of a large-scale historical period-level disruption in the social organization of time. We found that individual-level processes and group-level patterns diverged along ethnoracial lines in the context of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic and the wake of the murder of George floyd. These divergences emerged in terms of respondents’ reporting of the complex roles of the state, local organizations, and extended kinship networks as they recounted past experiences, present hardships, and hopes for the future.

In this talk, I describe these patterns in terms of the gendered racial structure of administrative burdens and their role in stratifying the distribution of wellbeing-promoting resources before and after the onset of the pandemic. This study contributes to the growing body of work exploring how life course transitions and trajectories unfold in the context of historical period-level changes in racialized social systems’ distribution of time resources and constraints. Specifically, it advances our understanding of the complex roles played by the racial state and racialized organizations in the context of acute life course transitions and longer-term wellbeing trajectories.

Speaker Biography: Collin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also a faculty associate of the Maryland Population Research Center and holds a courtesy faculty appointment in Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health. Mueller earned his B.A. from Rice University, an M.Div., M.A. in sociology, and a Ph.D. in sociology from Duke University, and completed his postdoctoral training through Duke’s Social Science Research Institute and Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development.