Category: What we’re up to

This talk analyses the phenomenon of ‘doomscrolling’ – the compulsive reading of anxiety-inducing online content – during the COVID-19 pandemic against the common idea that it is simply an addictive social practice that impedes mental flourishing. Instead, in order to open up its inclination towards care, I read doomscrolling through the anachronistic neologism that has come to define this textual practice. My talk reads the anxious textuality of Don DeLillo’s The Silence and Saidiya Hartman’s reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Comet’ to demonstrate how doomscrolling emerges from a moment in which trust is anxiously fractured, but how it works, nevertheless, to witness what gets to count within a time felt to be coming to an end.

11th January 2022 

12pm GMT

Zoom Link: https://iitgn-ac-in.zoom.us/j/93379454169

Meeting ID: 933 7945 4169
Passcode: 052495

More details here.

 

 

‘What forms does care take? What does taking care of oneself, another, or each other look and feel like?’ Members of the Waiting Times team recently joined scholars from critical medical humanities, disability studies, the environmental humanities, literary studies and feminist theory in response to the call to think about form as ‘that which might productively organise but also capture the protean nature of care’. These books, articles and projects are a selection of the work engaged in presentations and discussions across the workshop. They are shared here as a resource for others and to mark the event which took place online on the 9^th and 10^th September. The forms of care workshop was organised by Dr Erin Lafford (Oxford) and Dr Alexandra Kingston-Reese (York) courtesy of the University of York.

Details of individual presentations can be found below the reading list.

 

Forms for care conference – reading list selection:

Burke, L. (2014). Oneself as another: Intersubjectivity and ethics in Alzheimer’s illness narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 4(2), 28-47.

Butler, J. (2021) The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. Verso.

Fuchs, E (2005) Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama with Alzeheimer’s, Machine Tools, and Laughter. Metropolitan: New York.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013) New York: Minor Compositions

Hedva, Johanna. (2015) ‘My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically.’ Lecture, Human Resources, Los Angeles, October 7.

Jacoby, O. (1919/2019) Words in Pain: Letters on Life and Death. Ed. by J. Catty and T. Moore. Oxford: Skyscraper Publications.

Karjevsky G., Talevi, R., Bailer, S., (eds) (2020) Letters to Joan Tronto. With Edna Bonhomme, Johanna Bruckner, Teresa Dillon, Joao Florencio, Johanna Hedva, Elke Krasny, Patricia reed, Yayra Sumah and Joan Tronto. New Alphabet School.

Kittay, E. F. (2003) The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency (Feminist Constructions). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Stengers, I., (2011) The Care of the Possible: Isabelle Stengers interviewed by Erik Bordeleau, Landscape, Architecture, Political Economy, (1): 12-17.

Schaffer, Talia (2021) Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

The Care Collective (2020) Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal. The Care Manifesto: the Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

The Mind’s Eye (2021) Care Syllabus. MCLA. https://www.caresyllabus.org/about

Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (2010) ‘Care: Putting Practice into Theory’, in Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms, ed. by Annemarie Mol, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols (Verlag, Bielefeld: transcript).

Out of the Woods Collective (2020) Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions.

Whitehead, Anne. (2017) Medicine and Empathy in Contemporary British Fiction: An Intervention in Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

 

 

Programme:

Elizabeth Barry, ‘We Hang Up Laughing: Dementia, Care and the Temporality of Laughter’

Marie Allitt, ‘Stratifying Care: Geology and Grammar of Cancer and Hospital Care in Peter Reading’s C’

Lucy Burke, ‘Taking time: Reading Ali Smith’s There But For I as a form of care’

Alice Hall, ‘Caring and Curating: Women, Work and the Carers UK Archive’

Zoe Weinberg, Jade Colon, Amira F. Hassan, and Savanna Schaefer, ‘The Free Form of Freewriting as a Form of Care’

Elisabeth Pedersen, ‘The Catholic Worker Care Model: Building Interdependent Caring Communities and Kinships’

Lisa Baraitser and Stephanie Davies, ‘Waiting as Care’s Form: Notes from the Waiting Times Project’

Michael Flexer, ‘Signs You Care: Form in the Semiotic of Caring’

Jocelyn Catty and Laura Sailsbury, ‘Writing into the Future: Letters as Containers of Time and Care’

Jordan Osserman, ‘The ‘Object’ of the Puberty Blocker’

Kelechi Anucha, ‘Form and Fugitive Care’

Nicola Kirkby, ‘Care and Repair: Narrative Infrastructure in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853)’

David James, ‘Pathographic Close Reading’

Levi Prombaum, ‘A No Manifesto for Caring in Cultural Interpretation’

Victoria Papa, ‘Caremaking: Beyond Give & Take’ 

Laura Thompson, ‘Museological Critiques and Accessibility’

 

Stephanie Davies

Thu, Sep 9, 2021, 11:30 AM –

Fri, Sep 10, 2021, 3:30 PM BST

organised by  Alexandra Kingston-Reese and Erin Lafford

Continue reading “Forms of Care: An Interdisciplinary Workshop. 9-10th September. A two-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring care and its form(s) at the intersection of ethics, affect, and aesthetics.”

On Thursday 22 July 2021  12-1 pm (CET)/11 am-12 pm (UK) Professor Laura Salisbury will give a keynote paper “On Not Being Able to Read: Doomscrolling and Anxiety in Pandemic Times” at the International Conference: Fiction in the Age of Globalization (Universität Tübingen, Germany, online)

For information and program click here.

For (free) registration and the Zoom link please get in touch at arya.aryan@uni-tuebingen.de

*Discount tickets are available for Essex students and staff. For them, the conference cost is £25 for the whole event. You can access the ticket by going to the conference page, clicking the ‘Book Now’ button, then clicking ‘enter promo code’ in the new window. Then enter the code ‘People25‘, without quotations marks, which brings up the new ticket option.

PART 2: DIVERSITY OF PRACTICES

In 1918 Freud placed the free clinic at the heart of psychoanalytic thought and practice, and predicted that out-patient clinics would be started where treatment would be free.

His speech resonated with many psychoanalysts of his time, who were invested in the social mission of psychoanalysis and who were the authors of significant institutional innovations, setting up free and low-cost clinics in Vienna, Berlin and Budapest.

This conference starts from the premise that the more recent progressive histories of psychoanalysis remain little known among therapeutic practitioners. They are rarely written about in the professional literature or taught on trainings. Yet there is a rich tradition of psychoanalytic theory and practice which engages with the realities of social inequality based on class, gender, poverty, racism, and other forms of marginalisation. We aim to explore and recognise these socially-minded psychoanalytic practices, drawing on the experience of psychoanalysts working in free and low cost clinics in very different contexts, from Latin America, Africa, North America and Europe, through to the UK National Health Service. We ask what “psychoanalysis for the people” might mean in our times, more than 100 years after Freud’s famous speech.

Speakers: Joanna Ryan, Lisa Baraitser, Raluca Soreanu, Barry Watt, Geraldine Ryan, Christine Diercks, Daniel Gaztambide, Peter Nevins, Graham Music, Martin Moore, Emiliano de Camargo David

Keynote lecture: Tales Ab’Sáber (A Social Clinic as an Immanent Development of Psychoanalytic Theory: The Open Psychoanalysis Clinic)

This is the second of two conferences exploring socially engaged psychoanalytic practice. The first part took place on 16th and 17th January 2021 

Organised by: Raluca Soreanu & Joanna Ryan

Supported by: The Waiting Times Project (Wellcome Trust, PIs Lisa Baraitser and Laura Salisbury) and Balint Groups Project (Wellcome Trust, PI Raluca Soreanu).

Visit the Freud Museum to book tickets and see the full conference programme and abstracts.

 

Can literary and oral narratives work as forms of evidence? What do they tell us that more objective, statistical or quantitative forms of data cannot? Lara Choksey and Kelichi Anucha discuss the interplay between literary narrative and health contexts.

Lara Choksey is postdoctoral fellow in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter working on a project which brings literary and cultural studies approaches to questions of heredity and environment in the ‘postgenomic’ era. Her monograph, Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (Bloomsbury), is out in February 2021.

Kelichi Anucha is a PhD candidate working on the relationship between time and care in end of life narratives, as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded research project Waiting Times. Her current project focuses on contemporary end-of-life literature and visual cultures, paying particular attention to representations of impeded, disrupted and alternate temporalities.