About This Case Study

This is the project's last exercise, and it asks you to do the thing the whole module has been building toward: not to study how time was used against people, but to use time yourself. The unit has shown that progress was never the only shape time could take — that the calendar, like the archive, is an argument. Rasheedah Phillips and the Black Quantum Futurism collective turn that insight into practice: working from a storefront in a North Philadelphia neighborhood being cleared by redevelopment, they recorded residents' oral histories and futures, mapped the official schedules displacing them, and helped a community write its own timeline against the developer's. Their question — what could liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future? — is not rhetorical. It is a method. You will run a small version of it, for a community you actually belong to.

Two of the unit's ideas ground the work. Chronopolitics — the politics of time — means that clocks are never neutral: a deadline, a budget cycle, a development schedule encodes whose interests set the pace and whose are made to wait. Temporal sovereignty — the claim that a community's own durations and orientations are legitimate, not "behind" someone else's master clock — is what you will practice asserting. The analytical move is to treat a timeline as an instrument: to surface the official clock governing a real community question, ask whose it is, and then author a different one that includes the past that clock omits and the future the community intends. This is a thinking-and-imagining exercise, not a promise or a plan — but it is grounded, specific, and yours. You will choose a question, map its official clock, write the community's, and reflect on the difference.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Dismantling the Master's Clock reading guide (AK Press, 2025) — Phillips's free companion, whose collective-reflection prompts this protocol draws on. Download the guide (PDF).
• Time Zone Protocols — DIY protocols, for concrete examples of what a community futures exercise can look like and produce. Browse the DIY protocols. Use it for ideas and formats; you do not need to read all of it.
• A note-taking surface ruled for two timelines side by side, plus space for a short reflection.

A note on care: The questions this exercise invites — housing, school closures, a shuttering institution — touch real precarity in real communities, possibly your own. Keep this a space for thinking and imagining; it is not a commitment, a forecast, or advice, and naming a hard future here does not obligate anyone to it.

What a finished pair looks like, in miniature: Suppose the question is a neighborhood library branch slated to close. The official timeline runs: budget vote in spring, service wind-down over summer, doors closed by fall — a fiscal-year clock set by the city. The community timeline for the same branch runs backward and forward from a different center: the decades the branch has been where kids did homework and elders used computers (the past the budget line omits), and the future the community intends — a branch still open in five years, or its functions carried on somewhere the neighborhood chose. Same question, two clocks; the gap between them is the exercise.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Name a community you belong to — a block, a campus group, a congregation, a family, a workplace. What is one thing about its future that feels, right now, like it is on someone else's schedule?
• Whose clock does your daily life run on most — and when did you last get to set the pace of something that mattered?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Question with a Clock (10–12 minutes)

Choose one community you belong to and one question about its future that has a clock on it — a timeline someone is counting down. Housing (a lease, a rezoning, a development), schooling (a program, a closure, an admissions change), or a specific institution (a clinic, a library, a congregation, a shop) all work. Write the question in one sentence, name the community, and say why this question matters to it now. Keep it concrete and local enough that you actually know the details.

For groups: Each member proposes a question; the group picks one to work together, or pairs off to run two.

Phase 2: The Official Clock (12–15 minutes)

Map the timeline your question is officially on:

• Lay out the official schedule as dated steps: the deadlines, votes, budget cycles, permits, or development phases that govern what happens and when.
• For each step, ask whose clock it is — who set this pace, by what authority, in whose interest. Mark the moments where the community is positioned to wait, react, or comply rather than decide.
• Note what the official timeline leaves out entirely: what it treats as having no relevant past, and what future it simply assumes.

For groups: Build the official timeline together; assign members to name whose interest sets each step's pace.

Phase 3: The Community's Clock (15–18 minutes)

Now author the other timeline for the same question — run backward and forward from the community's center, not the official one:

• The past the official clock omits. What history does this community carry that the deadlines ignore — how long it has been here, what it has already survived, what the place has meant? Put that on the timeline; it is evidence, not decoration.
• The future the community intends. Write where the community would set the clock if it held the pen: what happens, by when, on whose terms. Be specific enough to picture.
• Choose your form. Render the community timeline as either a back/future-casting memo (starting from the intended future and working back to now) or a time-capsule letter to the community five years out. Either way, make it concrete — the worked example above is your model for scale.

For groups: Split — some draft the omitted past, some the intended future — then assemble one community timeline and choose its final form together.

Phase 4: What Changed When the Clock Changed (10–12 minutes)

Set the two timelines side by side and write a 300-word reflection:

• Which differences between the official clock and the community's surprised you most? Name the one that matters.
• What did the exercise make thinkable that the official schedule forecloses — about who decides the pace, about what the past is worth, about which futures are on the table?
• The strain test. Whose future did you just write — and who was not in the room when you wrote it? A community is not one voice; the reading guide's collective prompts assume many. Where does your single-authored timeline risk speaking over the very community it means to speak for, and what would doing this for real require that this exercise cannot?

For groups: Exchange reflections; mark one place where your neighbor's timeline assumed a "we" that might not hold.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The clock my community's question runs on belongs to __________. Writing our own timeline changed __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise — and after this whole module — is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly whose clock governs, exactly what re-authoring it made visible, and exactly what remains once the exercise ends.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your side-by-side timelines and your 300-word reflection — together, a record of one community's official clock and the one you authored beside it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. All four phases gain from working a shared question together; Phase 3's split-then-assemble and Phase 4's exchange are where the collective character of futures work — central to the practice this exercise draws on — becomes real. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The anchor: Phillips, Rasheedah. Dismantling the Master's Clock: On Race, Space, and Time. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2025. Publisher page. The full account of racialized linear time and the Black temporal practices that subvert it; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The living practice: Black Quantum Futurism (project site and publications). Visit the project site. Phillips and Camae Ayewa's collective, including the Community Futures Lab this protocol scales down; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.
• The theoretical statement: Eshun, Kodwo. "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism." CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287–302. Read the article (JSTOR). Afrofuturism as "chronopolitical intervention" — the contest over who controls tomorrow; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.