Temporality and lifelong education and learning

This editorial’s principal line of argument is based on the premise that the temporal aspects of lifelong education and learning have profound implications for adult education theory, methods, and practices (ESREA, Citation2024). Evidently, more focus – and more time – should be given to analytically incorporating temporality within the field of lifelong education and learning scholarship. Temporality is generally understood in two ways (1) as objective and (2) subjective (Alhadeff-Jones, Citation2017; Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, Citation2020; Frank et al., Citation2024). Although we must be careful not to distract ourselves with binary thinking and the traps of either/or dichotomies, as Alhadeff-Jones (Citation2017) outlines, understandings of time have shaped adult education literature across research, policy, and practice dimensions. However, as we identify in this editorial, the objective understanding has been the dominant temporal view. This dominance has come at the cost of gaining insight into the whole phenomenon of temporality and lifelong education and learning.