Save the Dates, The Time of Care, A Waiting Times Conference – Tuesday 28th – Wednesday 29th March

We would like to invite you to save the dates for our end-of-grant hybrid conference: The Time of Care: Conclusions from the Waiting Times Project. The event will take place on Tuesday 28th March – Wednesday 29th March 2023, together with a special show by renowned performance artist, Martin O’Brien, to open proceedings on the evening of Monday 27th March.

Waiting is one of healthcare’s core experiences. There from the time it takes to access services; through the days, weeks, months or years needed for diagnoses; in the time that treatment takes; and in the elongated time-frames of recovery, relapse, remission and dying. However, though often discussed and considered in terms of waiting lists and times, and especially in relation to health and social care crises, waiting is also vital to practices of care. 

Waiting Times has explored what it means to wait in and for healthcare by examining lived experiences, representations, and histories of impeded and delayed time. The project has mobilised a range of artistic and engaged research methodologies, as well as ethnographic, philosophical and historical investigations to consider different forms of suspended, elongated, and “non-productive” temporalities in different sites and practices: in forms of watchful waiting and recurrent waiting with that take place in general practice, mental health services, and trans care; within modes of chronic care and forms of time that are held and unfolded within psychotherapy; and as part of cultural framings, experiences, and care provided at the end of life.

The conference offers a final chance for our researchers to showcase their work, to reflect collectively on its meanings and implications, and to bring the team into conversation with invited speakers and research partners across a number of panels and performances.

We would be very keen for you to join us for these interactions, either in-person (at the Friends’ House, Euston Road, London) or online. 

Registration will open very soon, and we will share the Eventbrite link once our page is live. Attendance is free, and there will be no cap on online attendance. Our in-person capacity will be limited, however, and spaces will be made available in due course. 

We (somewhat ironically) can’t wait to share this time with you and we very much look forward to seeing you in some capacity in March!

The Waiting Times Team.

 

From the Bariatric Clinic – Dialogue between Dr Anuradha Menon and Prof Lisa Baraitser, 5 December 2022

The history of human obesity is complex. Modern Bariatric services offer medical and surgical interventions towards what proves a challenging task for both patient and clinician – that of encouraging sustained, substantial weight loss over a lifetime. Psychological approaches within bariatric services have a place not only in supporting treatment before and after surgery, but also in those who choose lifestyle modification over surgery. However, the focus of evidence-based approaches in healthcare settings is time-limited; and predictably on weight loss as the main desirable outcome rather than an exploration of the totality of the obese patients’ experience. Today’s Maudsley lecture is an attempt to address this gap by exploring the setting and frame of a Bariatric service from a psychoanalytical perspective. Dr Anuradha Menon who is a liaison psychiatrist and psychoanalyst working in a Bariatric service in Leeds will be in dialogue with Professor Lisa Baraitser, a psychoanalyst who has written widely on feminist theory, motherhood, ethics, care and temporality.


Chaired by Simon Harrison and Emma Hotopf


Anuradha Menon is a Member of the British Psychoanalytic Society and has an analytic practice in Leeds. She also works part time as a Consultant Psychiatrist in Medical Psychotherapy and Liaison Psychiatry in the Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust and leads the psychological service offered by the Specialist Weight Management Service (SWMS), a Tier 3 regional service for Bariatric patients seeking medical and surgical treatments for Obesity.

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Psychoanalyst and Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. She is the author of Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017) and Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) and has written widely on feminist theory, motherhood, ethics, care and temporality. She currently co-leads a Wellcome Trust research project on waiting in relation to healthcare.

5 December 2022
6:30pm – 8:00 pm
Recording available for 1 week to all registered participants
 
Hybrid Event
Online via Zoom and In Person at 10 Windsor Walk SE5 8BB
Click here to book the ticket.

 

New paper: ‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing Virtual Conference Spaces for Conviviality.

Reflections from the ‘Material Life of Time’ conference team regarding online networking, engagement, and overall success of the online conference by Michelle Bastian, Emil Henrik Flatø, Lisa Baraitser, Helge Jordheim, Laura Salisbury, Thom van Dooren

Short Abstract

Online conferences provide one avenue for potentially reducing academia’s carbon footprint. Their widespread take up is accompanied by concerns that they cannot provide adequate alternatives to the face-to-face, particularly in terms of building new networks. This paper reports on The Material Life of Time conference and the success of our efforts to plan explicitly for conviviality.

Full text is available here.

Beckett & Poetry/y La Poesía: 7th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society. Buenos Aires, 26-28 October 2022

The 7th annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society takes place this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Taking Beckett and Poetry as its theme, the conference will allow for an exploration of Beckett as a poet and the broader themes of poetics within his oeuvre. The event includes papers in English and Spanish further enhancing the opportunities for broadening interest in the Spanish-speaking world developed through the Society’s previous conferences in Mexico City (2018) and Almería (2019).

Laura Salisbury will present a keynote paper ‘What is the Word Again?’

Other keynote speakers include Daniel Caselli (University of Manchester], Ulrika Maude (University of Bristol), José Francisco Fernández (Universidad de Almería), Patrick Bixby (Arizona State University), and Feargal Whelan (Trinity College Dublin)

The conference is organized by the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires and CEAMC (Fundación Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Música Contemporánea) under the stewardship of the indefatigable Lucas Margarit.

Full details of events and the complete conference programme are available here.

Where is the Planetary? A series of events about the planet. Berlin, October 14-17th

Bild: Where is the Planetary? | Images by Koki Tanaka © All rights reserved

An old practice of “inhabiting” the earth is failing; a new one is not yet in sight. What diverse worldviews underlie the way we deal with the crisis of the planet? How can shared agency emerge from this? Where is the Planetary? brings together perspectives on a fragile and changeable planet in collaborative exercises and conversations. In experimental setups by the artist Koki Tanaka, scholars, artists and activists develop ways of living together under planetary conditions.

With Ravi Agarwal, Mohammad Al Attar, Felipe Castelblanco, Maria Chehonadskih, Shadreck Chirikure, Myung-Ae Choi, Orit Halpern, Valentina Karga, John Kim, Francine McCarthy, Margarida Mendes, Claire Pentecost, Jahnavi Phalkey, Patricia Reed, Sophia Roosth, Nishant Shah, Adania Shibli, Fernando Silva e Silva, Rebecca Snedeker, Nikiwe Solomon, Koki Tanaka, Simon Turner, Mark Williams, Mi You and Jan Zalasiewicz. Facilitated by Lisa Baraitser, continent., Kai van Eikels, L. Sasha Gora, TINT and Gary Zhexi Zhang.

Where is the Planetary?
A Gathering | In Collaboration with Koki Tanaka

Fri–Sun, Oct 14–16
Practices and Conversations
In English
Free admission

Lisa Baraitser is opening the event with Koki Tanaka on Friday 14th October and will participate with the talk about care, repair and maintenance in relation to planetary damage on Saturday 15th.

More about the program: hkw.de/en/planetary

Earth Indices. Processing the Anthropocene
An exhibition by Giulia Bruno and Armin Linke

Until Mon, Oct 17
Daily, except Tue, 12 noon–8 pm
Free admission
More about the exhibition: hkw.de/en/indices

Circumcision on the Couch: The Cultural, Psychological and Gendered Dimensions of the World’s Oldest Surgery

29th of September, in The Old Operating Theatre, Jordan Osserman talked about his recent book Circumcision On the Couch. The evening was illuminated by short art performances by Martin O’Brien and FYTA, and a discussion with Professor Lisa Baraitser.

“Penises, and the things people do with them, have been subjects of controversy for a long time. Jordan Osserman’s recently published book Circumcision on the Couch draws on the discipline of psychoanalysis to examine how one thing that some people do to penises – surgically remove the foreskin – has become a site upon which vital questions of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and psychic life are negotiated. In this event, Jordan and his invited guests will make use of the Old Operating Theatre’s incredible surgical setting to bring to life some major themes of the book: the nineteenth-century transformation of circumcision from a religious rite to a medical procedure designed to cure ‘nervous illness’; the psychological dynamics of contemporary anti-circumcision activism (‘intactivism’); and the psychoanalytical theories that address the symbolic significance of the phallic ‘cut’. The event will include two short performances by internationally acclaimed artists Martin O’Brien and FYTA which will address contemporary debates around circumcision and gender politics, and a discussion with Professor Lisa Baraitser about the book”.

 

Martin O’Brien, photo by Alma Daskalaki

Jordan Osserman and FYTA, photo by Alma Daskalaki

 

Jordan Osserman is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and a psychoanalyst in formation. His research interests include the medical humanities, the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalysis, left-wing politics, and gender/sexuality studies.
Martin O’Brien is an artist and scholar, concerned with the performance and representation of illness and disability. His artistic practice uses physical endurance, hardship and pain-based practices to challenge common representations of illness and to examine what it means to be born with a life-threatening disease. He is a member of the Waiting Times project and has performed at venues including the Tate Britain, ICA, and ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and has been commissioned by organizations including Arts Council England and British Council.
FYTA are an Athens- and London-based conceptual and performance art duo comprised of artists and academics Dr Foivos Dousos and Dr Fil Ieropoulous. Their interdisciplinary work draws on queer and psychoanalytic ideas to question and destabilize notions of truth, national belonging, and naturality. They have performed/exhibited in venues including the Freud Museum, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Athens Biennale; most recently they were commissioned by the Greek National Opera to stage a queer rendition of Orpheus.
Lisa Baraitseris Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck College, and co-PI of the Waiting Times project, a five-year cycle of research on temporality and care in health contexts. She is the author of an award-winning monograph, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption(2009) andEnduring Time(2017). Her work is concerned with gender and temporality, focusing on a range of durational practices and social projects (psychoanalysis, mothering, care, incarceration, activism) in a bid to understand affective survival in late liberal conditions.

This event was generously supported by the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and the Waiting Times project.

Parapraxis Conversations: On The Maternal. 9-10th July 2022

A Conversation on “The Maternal.” Part of a recurring lecture series centered on keywords in psychosocial thought.

Join The Psychosocial Foundation and Parapraxis for a conversation on “The Maternal” with Dr. Joy James, Dr. Lisa Baraitser, and Dr. Sarah Knott. Moderated by Dr. Hannah Zeavin.

Tickets are sliding-scale. Your contributions fund our continued work at The Psychosocial Foundation, including Parapraxis Magazine. To learn more about the whole series, click here. To learn more about Parapraxis , click here.

Date and time:

Sat, Jul 9, 2022, 6:00 PM –

Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 7:30 AM BST

Location:

Online event

Book Tickets 

Time for Emancipation: Poetry, Waiting, Repair. 26 May 2022

Symposium and workshop on the elusive concept of freedom, and exploring how we write about it. In-person.

When:
Venue: Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square

Book your place

Jenny Mitchell, award-winning writer and Artist in Association at Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), will facilitate a supportive 3-hour creative writing session in the morning of this day-long event, that looks at how we write about the elusive concept of freedom. What draws us to writing about freedom? What might it offer the writer and reader? Is it particularly important to think about freedom in a world so filled with subjugation, tyranny and chaos?

This is a participatory creative writing session and participants will be given examples of work by established poets to discuss; and prompts to stimulate their own writing.

This is followed by an afternoon symposium that explores questions of care and repair, reflecting on the waiting time between enslavement and emancipation from the perspective of Black British women. Jenny Mitchell offers new poems that retell the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of a free 19th century woman of colour, questioning the role of servant or caregiver that women of colour are stereotypically forced to inhabit in relation to a dominant white culture that offers little care in return. Poets, historians and literary scholars will discuss the issues the poems raise – relations between Black and white women, freedom, and elongated modes of ‘waiting’, and poetry as a radical form of care and repair.

The symposium is a collaboration between Arts Week, Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality (BiGS), and Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded research collaboration that is re-evaluating the relation between time and healthcare in the modern period. The symposium will be followed by a wine reception to celebrate Jenny Mitchell’s role as Artist-in-Association at BiGS, and her new collection of poems.

Participants can book for the whole day, or can attend just one session (either the poetry workshop or the symposium).      

Poetry workshop 10am – 1pm
Symposium 2pm – 5pm

Jenny Mitchell is an award-winning poet and workshop facilitator. Her second collection, Map of a Plantation, is winner of the Poetry Book Awards 2021. She won the Bedford International Poetry Prize 2021, the Ware Prize 2020, the Folklore and Aryamati Prizes, a Bread and Roses Award and several other competitions. A debut collection, Her Lost Language, is joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize and was voted One of 44 Books of 2019 (Poetry Wales). She is an Artist in Association at Birkbeck currently working on a pamphlet and third collection.

Roy McFarlane is a Poet, Playwright and former Youth & Community Worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage, living in Brighton. He is the National Canal Laureate and has held the role of Birmingham Poet Laureate. His debut collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath, was followed by The Healing Next Time, (Nine Arches Press 2018) nominated for the Ted Hughes award and Jhalak Prize. His third collection Living by Troubled Waters is due out October 2022.  It includes a series of erasure poems drawing on narratives of the enslaved across the African diaspora, found in newspapers and posters in England and the Caribbean, post 1807.

Keith Jarrett is a writer, performer and educator whose work explores Caribbean British identity, religion and sexuality. Keith teaches at NYU London and is completing his debut novel.

S.I. Martin works with museums, archives and the education sector to bring diverse histories to wider audiences. He has published five books of historical fiction and non-fiction for adult and teenage readers.

Olivia Carpenter is Lecturer in Literature at the University of York. Her research focuses on Black Studies, Critical Race Theory and literary history. Her recent monograph on Black marriage in domestic fiction in the late 18th and early 19th century gives an account of how the politics of slavery and Abolition influenced the novel as a genre during the height of Abolition struggles in British courts, as well as Black resistance to slavery in both Britain and the colonies.

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck. She is the Co-Principal Investigator, with Laura Salisbury, of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust-funded collaborative award investigating the relation between time and care in the modern period. She has written widely on motherhood, psychoanalysis, time and care.

Kelechi Anucha
Kelechi is PhD candidate on the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project. She is an associate member of the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at University of Exeter and a member of the Black Health and Humanities Network. Her project examines time and care in contemporary end-of-life narratives, exploring the relationship between untimeliness, literary form and the politics of health.

https://waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk/team-time/

https://wcceh.org/meet-the-team/phd-students/kelechi-anucha/

https://www.blackhealthandhumanities.org/people/

About

This event takes place in-person at Birkbeck’s School of Arts, as part of Arts Week 2022.  https://www.bbk.ac.uk/annual-events/arts-week/arts-week/arts-week-2022

Communication about this event will be sent from messenger@bbk.ac.uk. Do check your Spam/Junk/Other inbox if you are looking for emails from this address.

Laura Salisbury talk at “Trans Healthcare: Past, Present & What Might Have Been” seminar. 26 Apr 2022

Part of a broader project on Trans Healthcare and Creativity, this event will explore the past, present and ‘what might have been’ of trans healthcare provision in the UK. What is trans healthcare now, what has it been, and what could it be?

Join us for a roundtable discussion with contributions from speakers from a range of disciplines and practices, including:

Ellis J. Johnson (he/him) is a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic counsellor, supervisor, trainer, consultant and group facilitator, working mainly alongside transgender, non-binary, queer or questioning people. As a transgender man of mixed-heritage, Ellis is passionate about attending to the intersections of race, class, and coloniality in his work; he holds a particular interest in decolonising our understandings of gender, sexuality and spirituality. He delivers training in trans inclusion and anti-racist practice to organisations and therapists across the UK and internationally.

Stephen Whittle OBE is Professor of Equalities Law at Manchester Metropolitan University. In 1992, Stephen was a co-founder of Press for Change (PFC), the UK’s trans rights lobby group. PFC’s very successful campaigns have resulted in several major case law successes at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, which have led to significant legal changes since the mid-1990s, including the Gender Recognition Act 2004, and full protection under the Equality Act 2010. Stephen has advised on transgender rights and law to the UK, Scottish, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Hong Kong, and South African governments, as well as the European Union & the Commission, and the Council of Europe. He regularly advises lawyers and writes briefs, or is an expert witness, for courts worldwide. He has authored many academic papers, non-academic articles, several books and writes a regular blog.

Krishna Istha is a London-based screenwriter, comedian, performance artist and theatre maker. They make socially conscious, form-pushing works about taboo or underrepresented experiences of gender, race and sexual politics. Currently, they are writing on Sex Education (Netflix), is a Barbican Centre Open Lab artist (2022), and is part of the writing team at Die Gute Fabrik (a Copenhagen-based games studio). More recently, they co-directed Jazz and Dice by Naked Productions for BBC Radio 4, was an Arts Admin Bursary Artist (2020-21), and came Runner-Up on Screenshot (a competition for comedy writer-performers hosted by Sister Pictures and South of the River Pictures).

Laura Salisbury is a Professor in Medicine and English Literature at the University of Exeter. She has research and teaching interests in modernist, postmodernist and contemporary fiction; medical humanities; philosophies of temporality, ethics and affect; psychoanalysis; neuroscience and language. With Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck) she is joint PI on a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award called ‘Waiting Times’ (2017-2022), a project working to uncover what it means to wait in and for healthcare. She is currently writing a cultural history of waiting in modernity.

Ruth Pearce is a trans health activist and Lecturer in Community Development at the University of Glasgow. Her work explores issues of inequality, marginalisation, power, and transformative political struggle from a trans feminist perspective. She has conducted research on trans health services in the UK, international alternatives to traditional gender clinics, and trans people’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. She is the author of “Understanding Trans Health”, plus co-editor of “The Emergence of Trans” and “TERF Wars”. Ruth also plays bass in noise-pop band wormboys, shouts a lot in queer punk trio Dispute Settlement Mechanism, and blogs at http://ruthpearce.net.

This event is accompanied by a writing workshop for trans, non-binary and GNC writers on Friday 29 April, led by Juliet Jacques: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trans-healthcare-creativity-writing-workshop-with-juliet-jacques-tickets-316626738097

Trans Healthcare and Creativity is funded by the University of Manchester. Our aim is to contribute to current conversations about trans healthcare provision in the UK whilst advocating for the role of creativity in imagining future models of care. Our second event will take place on Tuesday 7th June, on the theme of ‘Possible Futures’. To contact us, email: transhealthcareandcreativity@gmail.com.

18:00-20:00 26 Apr 2022

The event is FREE. Please register via Eventbrite. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trans-healthcare-creativity-past-present-what-might-have-been-tickets-316783436787


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