A multi-stranded research project on the temporalities of healthcare
The coffin is sealed shut; the faint sound of coughing can be heard from inside, ringing out through the night. In another place, a group are meeting. The Last Breath Society gather to breathe together, to mourn their own life and rehearse for the inevitable.
– Martin O’Brien
Continue reading “The Last Breath Society (Coughing Coffin), ICA, London. 24 July – 1 August”
As part of our ongoing partnership with Hospiscare, Messages in Bottles, we held three showcases of work produced by service-users of the Honiton day hospice.
These three events presented written stories, pictures, songs and short films made in our storytelling and story sharing collaborative workshops. We had participants – service-users, staff and researchers – as well as family, friends, carers and other members of the Hospiscare team come along for an afternoon of reading, thinking, talking and sharing at the King’s House day hospice in Honiton.
We also had plenty of tea, cake, laughter and the occasional tear.
Our next planned event is a tour of local libraries. We’ll be taking interactive displays of the stories to Honiton, Seaton, Sidmouth, Axminster and Exeter. We had planned to start this tour in April 2020, but we had to postpone for obvious reasons. Hopefully, libraries will re-open after the summer and we will be able to take take our show on the road then.
Until then, you can listen to some of the stories here.
In collaboration with Dr Arthur Rose (Bristol), Michael organised a series of lunchtime seminars for Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy practitioners at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital.
The workshops grew out of discussions with an OT nurse who attended a Waiting Times workshop at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. In addition to fostering links and dialogue between the research team and healthcare professionals, the seminars aim to provide humanities research-based ideas and inspiration for developing clinical practice, using the Waiting Times research as a major source of insight.
In November 2019, Michael shared stories, video and audio from the Messages in Bottles project he and Kelechi have worked on in partnership with Hospiscare.
In February 2020, Michael ran a workshop on how semiotic techniques can be applied to understand and improve upon communication, information exchange and partnership between patients and healthcare professionals in the clinical encounter.
Dr Rose, Michael and the OT team at RD&E will be planning future lunchtime seminars for the year 2020/21.
Committed to the End: On Care Work and Rereading
Professor Elizabeth Freeman (University of California, Davis)
B01 Clore Management Centre
Birkbeck College
London
WC1E 7JL
18.00 – 20.00
Friday, 24 May 2019
Professor Elizabeth Freeman – a leading queer theorist and author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories – will be giving a lecture on the intersections between the spatiotemporalities of domestic fiction, re-reading and care taking at Birkbeck on 24 May, 2019.
The is a free event but booking is required via the Eventbrite page. Tickets are limited so sign up quickly.
For full details please visit the Birkbeck website.
Krapp’s Last Tape performances at Exeter University
Birks Grange 19 March 2019
Lopes Hall 20 March 2019Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations! And the resolutions!
In March 2019, we staged two performances of Philip Robinson’s remarkable living room production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, directed by Polly Whitfield. The performances took place in public spaces in student accommodation for small audiences of seven first-year BA students.
Our objective – aside from introducing students to this remarkable, funny, harrowing play about time and identity – was to begin a consultation with students about a potential longitudinal study, inspired by Krapp’s tape-recorded memoir.
We had very rich discussions with our students about how this project could develop. Although currently on hold because of Covid-19, we hope to launch an online platform where students can record a yearly update on their life, and listen to previous years’ entries, and continue to do this throughout their time at Exeter and beyond.
We also massively recommend Philip Robinson’s intimate living room theatre one-man shows to anyone and everyone.
The National Health Service turned 70 this year. To celebrate, the Wellcome Trust-funded Waiting Times team and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health collaborated with colleagues at Libraries Unlimited and University of Warwick to organise a birthday party.
This was be no ordinary do, however. As part of our public engagement strategy, we organised a host of activities to mark the occasion, to explore the history and future of the NHS, and to collect memories and narratives of service use (and waiting) over the past 70 years.
Stalls for the public included:
You’re invited to a very special birthday party – Saturday, 30thJune 1-3pm at Exeter Central Library, Castle Street (click here for map)
The National Health Service is 70 this year. To celebrate, the Wellcome Trust-funded Waiting Times team and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health are collaborating with colleagues at the Exeter Library and University of Warwick to organise a birthday party.
This will be no ordinary do, however. As part of our public engagement strategy, we will be organising a host of activities to mark the occasion, to explore the history and future of the NHS, and to collect memories and narratives of service use (and waiting) over the past 70 years. Stalls for the public will include:
It will be fun for all the family and finished in time for the football too!
If you are interested in volunteering, or hearing more about the event, then please email:
martin.moore@exeter.ac.uk and m.flexer@exeter.ac.uk
We are particularly keen to hear from anyone else who is turning or has turned 70 in 2018. We’d love to celebrate your birthday at the same time!
In collaboration with the Temporal Belongings network, we’ll be holding our inaugural conference in Edinburgh, on 5th-7th June 2018.
The aim of this conference is to share current research on the social nature of time and to collaboratively reflect on key issues, problems and methodological approaches. In keeping with previous Temporal Belongings events, we will include a mixture of presentation styles, and plenty of time for discussion. We are particularly interested in playing with the traditional time of the academic conference and will include collaborative, participant-driven sessions where themes emerging from the presentations can be synthesised and explored in greater depth.
Keynote speakers for the conference are:
Please send any queries to temporalbelongings@gmail.com
Michelle Bastian
Lisa Baraitser
Andrew Hom
Laura Salisbury
Conference Committee
For programme details and to book, please visit the conference website.
Enduring Time by Lisa Baraitser
Book launch and panel discussion
19.00-20.30
Thursday 15th March
Swedenborg House
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London
WC1A 2TH
Celebrating the publication of Lisa Baraitser’s Enduring time, a panel of scholars (Laura Salisbury, Stella Sandford and Raluca Soreanu) will engage with the book to consider the changing ways we imagine and experience time. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become stuck, intensely felt, yet radically suspended. The question the book raises is how we might now ‘take care’ of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time – waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating – tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?
Praise for the book
This work is a tour de force. It constitutes the most significant rethinking of “women’s time” since Kristeva’s influential article. [ …] It brings philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural theory, feminism and race theory, art and art criticism, together with trenchant social critique, philosophical meditation, and psychoanalytic inquiry in a brilliant and capacious way. Without any recourse to essentialism, Baraitser shows us for the first time the temporal world of care, of maintenance, their nonproductive and nonteleological potentials in an ethics that illuminates our world as one of time-consuming practices of staying with and for one another in the midst of destruction and repair (Judith Butler, UC Berkeley).
The panel discussion will be followed by a wine reception.
