11:45 - Carmen Leccardi (IT) is Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca. She has researched extensively in the fields of time, youth cultures and gender. She was a former co-editor (1999-2008) of the journal Time & Society. Recent publications include A New Youth? Youth, Generations and Family Life (2006) and Sociologie del tempo. Soggetti e tempo nella ’società dell’accelerazione’ (Sociologies of Time. Subjects and time in the ‘acceleration society’) (2009). According to Leccardi, “we live today in a constant becoming which wraps present and future together in the same fluid temporal packaging. The time-anxiety that we suffer is unprecedented. The acceleration of social rhythms is first and foremost an economic strategy and it has produced a widespread cult of urgency on the everyday level, erasing all individual possibility of control. This mechanism has terrible effects on the individual construction of identity, forcing people to put to use forms of control and self-defence.”