‘Containment, delay, mitigation’: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

Baraitser, Lisa; Salisbury, Laura

doi:10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15970.2

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…It can help, for instance, articulate the potential importance of holding open time in the absence of curative possibilities ( Davies, 2022 ), or how waiting in uncertainty might offer more effective responses than a rush to judgment. At the same time, it can enable us to acknowledge the complexities of waiting; its potential not only for care but its contributions to – and entanglements with – forms of emotional harm and structural violence ( Baraitser & Salisbury, 2020 ). Even here, however, what we hope to have shown is that a relentless drive to reduce waiting per se is not always the most reasonable response.…”

Section: Recovering Histories Of Waiting?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

Bar-Haim¹,

Baraitser²,

Moore³

2023

Wellcome Open Res

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Waiting is at the centre of experiences and practices of healthcare. However, we know very little about the relationship between the subjective experiences of patients who wait in and for care, health practitioners who ‘prescribe’ and manage waiting, and how this relates to broader cultural meanings of waiting. Waiting features heavily in the sociological, managerial, historical and health economics literatures that investigate UK healthcare, but the focus has been on service provision and quality, with waiting (including waiting lists and waiting times) drawn on as a key marker to test the efficiency and affordability of the NHS. In this article, we consider the historical contours of this framing of waiting, and ask what has been lost or occluded through its development. To do so, we review the available discourses in the existing literature on the NHS through a series of ‘snapshots’ or key moments in its history. Through its negative imprint, we argue that what shadows these discourses is the idea of waiting and care as phenomenological temporal experiences, and time as a practice of care. In response, we begin to trace the intellectual and historical resources available for alternative histories of waiting – materials that might enable scholars to reconstruct some of the complex temporalities of care marginalized in existing accounts of waiting, and which could help reframe both future historical accounts and contemporary debates about waiting in the NHS.

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Section: Recovering Histories Of Waiting?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

Bar-Haim¹,

Baraitser²,

Moore³

2023

Wellcome Open Res

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“…Thus we have always been interested in how we meet as researchers, including ways of challenging the largely passive nature of academic events (Bastian, 2014). Alongside this, the Lifetimes group in Oslo has been researching practices of synchronisation across cultures and historical periods (Jordheim & Ytreberg, 2021), while the Waiting Times project has focused on the relations between time and care, particularly in healthcare contexts (Baraitser & Salisbury, 2020). Together, we saw the move to online as an opportunity to experiment with care-full synchronisation practices.…”

Section: Being Together In Timementioning

confidence: 99%

‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality

Bastian

Flatø

Baraitser

et al. 2022

Geography and Environment

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Geography, like many other disciplines, is reckoning with the carbon intensity of its practices and rethinking how activities such as annual meetings are held. The Climate Action Task Force of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), for example, was set up in 2019 and seeks to transform the annual conference in light of environmental justice concerns. Mirroring shifts in geographic practice across the globe, these efforts point to a need to understand how new opportunities for knowledge production, such as online events, can operate effectively. In this paper, we offer suggestions for best practice in virtual spaces arising from our Material Life of Time conference held in March 2021, a two-day global event that ran synchronously across 15 time zones. Given concerns about lack of opportunities for informal exchanges at virtual conferences, or the 'coffee break problem', we designed the event to focus particularly on opportunities for conviviality. This was accomplished through a focus on three key design issues: the spatial, the temporal, and the social. We review previous work on the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous and asynchronous online conference methods and the kinds of geographic communities they might support. We then describe our design approach and reflect on its effectiveness via a variety of feedback materials. We show that our design enabled high delegate satisfaction, a sense of conviviality, and strong connections with new colleagues. However, we also discuss the problems with attendance levels and external commitments that hampered shared time together. We thus call for collective efforts to support the 'event time' of online meetings, rather than expectations to fit them around everyday tasks. Even so, our results suggest that synchronous online events need not result in geographical exclusions linked to time-zone differences, and we outline further recommendations for reworking the spacetimes of the conference.

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“…Indeed, even if the virus per se fades from view in a given context, the spectre of its potential return eviscerates the possibility of ever returning to life without it. In an effort to understand this context, Baraitser and Salisbury ( 2020 ) have analysed the temporalities of “containment,” “delay,” and “mitigation”—terms that (if heavily contested) are central to public health interventions designed to predict and contain and, to some degree, control the spread of the virus—around a notion of waiting in pandemic time. They have also argued that “the often mundane temporalities of socially reproductive labour—temporalities of waiting, repeating, staying, returning, maintaining, enduring, persisting”—indeed practices of care more generally—are typically obscured in a logic of the return.…”

Section: Emergency Governance and Uneven Distributions Of Futuritymentioning

confidence: 99%

The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID‐19

Grove

Rickards

Anderson

et al. 2021

Geographical Research

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The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post‐event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as racism, poverty, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which inflect how the pandemic is known and governed as an emergency. In this article, we reflect on COVID‐19 responses in two settler colonial societies—Australia and the United States—to consider how distinct styles of pandemic responses in each context resonate and dissonate across the racially uneven distribution of futurity that structures liberal order. In each case, the event of COVID‐19 has indeed opened a window that reveals multiple slow emergencies; yet in these and other responses this revelation is not leading to meaningful changes to address underlying forms of structural violence. In Australia and the United States, we see how specific slow emergencies—human‐induced climate change and anti‐Black violence in White supremacist societies, respectively—become intensified as liberal order recalibrates itself in response to the event of COVID‐19.

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‘Containment, delay, mitigation’: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

Cited by 10 publications

References 16 publications

The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

The shadows of waiting and care: on discourses of waiting in the history of the British National Health Service.

‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality

The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID‐19

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