On the Potentialities of Spaces of Care: Openness, Enticement, and Variability in a Psychiatric Center

Abstract

Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have turned their attention to the materiality of objects and buildings in order to examine what they make users do in practice. Taking a close look at a therapeutic community in a psychiatric day care center for teenagers, this paper joins these discussions by exploring the materiality of “spaces of care” as part of the center’s everyday practice. The analysis incorporates the concepts of scripts and dispositifs to describe the conditions of possibility in which caregivers and youths may position themselves in relation to others and to the space itself. This paper describes how spaces of care offer open, enticing, and variable conditions for fostering a dynamic of personal and relational responses as part of the care work. In this sense, the material environment entails potentialities in ways that are unpredictable but nonetheless consequential. Rather than arguing that material arrangements and things act, this paper draws attention to their impact via their potential within dispositifs of care that request participants’ attentiveness and responsiveness. Describing these potentialities brings out the subtler requirements of material environments in care practices that aim at circumventing the coercion of disciplinary spaces and their impersonal classifications.

The Secret Lives of Corridors: Networks of Relations in Transitional Built Spaces

“…Gutman (2010, p. 155) argues that “a building cannot be conceived apart from the human activities it serves to facilitate and encourage.” Pinch (2008) shares the same view when highlighting the necessity of studying both people and things to see how interactions between them occur and what the outcomes are. Studies addressing built spaces and the interactions that shape them include work on apartment building lobbies (Bearman, 2005), trading room offices (Stark, 2009), laboratories (Owen-Smith, 2013), engineering offices (Allen, 1977), corridors (Hurdley, 2010; Iedema et al, 2010), doors (D’Hoop, 2018), schools and dormitories (Heilweil, 1973; Minami & Tanaka, 1995), business centers (Perrée et al, 2018) as well as coffee machine and photocopier rooms (Fayard & Weeks, 2007). Despite this apparent multitude, the detailed exploration of buildings remains an “underdeveloped field of enquiry” (Jones, 2011) in terms of understanding their variety of hosted interactions.…”

“…However, as mentioned above, ANT differs from other approaches in its quest to comprehend the socio-technical world through a network perspective that produces relational effects among human and non-human actors (Akrich, 1992; Akrich & Latour, 1992; Latour, 1992). In contrast to studies exploring spaces in which the social and physical aspects are considered strictly separate (Dean, 2017; D’Hoop, 2018; Goffman, 1959, 1963; Hurdley, 2010; Pinch, 2008), ANT-based studies view the social/physical or human/non-human relational dynamics as constitutive of space (Callon, 1991; Latour, 1986; Law, 2002). In fact, ANT is different from other relational approaches in that it does not consider any reality outside these relational effects (Harman, 2009).…”