What a wonderful way to wrap up my stay as a Visiting Fellow at the #CAS (Centre for Advanced Study) in Sofia, Bulgaria: A research colloquium with my brilliant doctoral and postdoctoral students: Alexandra Engström, Lena Rieck, Chris Schäfer and Jonas Friedrich. We spent two and a half days of meaningful discussions and sometimes intense debate on our ongoing research projects at the intersection of #time, #sustainability, and #digitalization, asking questions such as:

– WHY do companies struggle to align what they do in the present with their declared goals for the future?

– HOW can we ensure that digitalization contributes to sustainable development rather than undermine it?

– HOW do organizations design and deploy simulation models to make sense of and handle natural disaster risks?

– WHAT relational infrastructures are necessary to make democratic forms of organizing work?

Discussing and providing feedback on early career scholars’ projects is one of the most rewarding parts of academic work, and my hometown Sofia could not have provided a better site for this colloquium.

As a town where cultural heritage from the #Roman, #Medieval Bulgarian, #Byzantine, and #Ottoman periods exists side-by-side with #Habsburg architecture, #Soviet monumentalism, a vibrant contemporary art scene, and a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem, Sofia enabled us to see the material “shape of time” (to cite Kubler), and its multi-layered and never-quite-settled nature, in very literal terms. Special thanks to the CAS team and its director Diana Mishkova for hosting me and us!