Chiasmic time: Being-in-time in time being

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Waiting Times via the URL in this recordTime Being is a collaborative film made by Ruairí Corr and Deborah Robinson that explores the temporalities that emerge when the primacy of sight and sound in film is brought together with touch, breath, vibration, smell, heat, and other somatic sensations that enable us to feel ourselves in and through the world, remaking it as we go. Ruairí is a creative maker living with a complex set of visual and sensory-processing differences related to the condition adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). Deborah is an artist who uses film and neurodivergent experiences of time and attention in ways that disrupt narrative sequence. As Ruairí and Deborah developed a collaborative relationship over time, they used practice-as-research methods that attended to Ruairí’s everyday experience to develop forms of audio-visual representation that reframe normative versions of time. They worked together to find ways of holding in film the time made when the world is sensed through the hands, the lungs, the stomach, the skin, and through the temporal displacements of alternative experiences of sight and sound. Through a practice of waiting, slowing, and attending to these sensations, the work gradually emerged. This was not a form of coming to know ‘about’ the world, but one of making sense of it ‘otherwise’, over and through time. And as the film slows the viewer down, inviting them to wait with and dwell in the images and sounds, it works to expand understandings of how the senses work according to multiple yet distinct tempos, beats, and rhythms.Wellcome Trus

A Comparative Analysis of First Day Neonatal Mortality Between Adolescents and Adult Females Giving Birth at Ligula Hospital in Mtwara, South Eastern Tanzania 2008 – 2009

Objective: Compare first day neonatal mortality between adolescents and adults delivering at the main referral hospital in Mtwara, TanzaniaDesign: Cross-sectional chart reviewSetting: The study was conducted at the main referral hospital in Mtwara, Tanzania. Rates of adolescent pregnancy at the hospital were 15.5% in 2009 and 14.3% in 2010Subjects: A total of 450 adolescent and adult females delivering at Ligula Hospital between 2008 and 2009 were included in the study.Outcome measures: First day neonatal mortality between adolescents and adults was the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes included neonatal birth weight, parity, gravidity, prematurity, HIV and neonates delivered.Results: First day neonatal mortality was 5.56%. Birth weight was the only risk factor significantly associated with neonatal mortalityConclusion: Younger women have predisposal to neonatal mortality due to underlying causal mechanisms. In order to validate the results of this study, further research on risk and causes of first day neonatal mortality at facilities is warranted

Waiting and care in pandemic times collection

This editorial introduces a collection of research articles and reflections on what it means to wait during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written from conditions of lockdown, this collection gathers together the initial thoughts of a group of interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have been working on questions of waiting and care through a project called  . [Abstract copyright: Copyright: © 2020 Baraitser L and Salisbury L.

Identity, community and care in online accounts of hereditary colorectal cancer syndrome

Sociological literature has explored how shifts in the point at which individuals may be designated as diseased impact upon experiences of ill health. Research has shown that experiences of being genetically “at risk” are shaped by and shape familial relations, coping strategies, and new forms of biosociality. Less is known about how living with genetic risk is negotiated in the everyday and over time, and the wider forms of identity, communities and care this involves. This article explores these arrangements drawing on online bloggers’ accounts of Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP). We show how accounts of genetic risk co-exist with more palpable experiences of FAP in everyday life, notably the consequences of prophylactic surgeries. We consider how the act of blogging represents but also constitutes everyday experiences of hereditary cancer syndrome as simultaneously ordinary and exceptional, and reflect on the implications of our analysis for understanding experiences of genetic cancer risk

Introduction: The social life of time

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordWellcome Trus

On waiting for something to happen

This paper seeks to examine two particular and peculiar practices in which the mediation of apparently direct encounters is made explicit and is systematically theorized: that of the psychoanalytic dialogue with its inward focus and private secluded setting, and that of theatre and live performance, with its public focus. Both these practices are concerned with ways in which “live encounters” impact on their participants, and hence with the conditions under which, and the processes whereby, the coming-together of human subjects results in recognizable personal or social change. Through the rudimentary analysis of two anecdotes, we aim to think these encounters together in a way that explores what each borrows from the other, the psychoanalytic in the theatrical, the theatrical in the psychoanalytic, figuring each practice as differently committed to what we call the “publication of liveness”. We argue that these “redundant” forms of human contact continue to provide respite from group acceptance of narcissistic failure in the post-democratic era through their offer of a practice of waiting

Turning back

This response to Miri Rozmarin’s paper, Staying Alive, focuses on the question of what it might mean to create a response to matricide and patriarchal violence that is grounded in the particularities of cultural and personal history. Rozmarin’s rendering of a possible response to matricide through the mother-daughter genealogy is illustrated in her analysis of the Biblical myth of Lot’s wife. She claims that this story of destruction, punishment and incest reveals ‘an option of non-matricidal relations’ and she gives a compelling account of how this could be so. In my response, I suggest that there are alternative ‘against the grain’ readings that are grounded in the Jewish traditions and sensibilities in which such ‘mythic’ material is embedded and from which it draws its vitality. I offer an example of this, not to refute Rozmarin’s claims, but to suggest that something more nuanced and even loving can be found in the specificity of this cultured and gendered encounter, and that this better meets the conditions for ‘concrete’ ethical resistance that she seeks

Investigating waiting: Interdisciplinary thoughts on researching elongated temporalities in healthcare settings

This is the final version. Available from Routledge via the DOI in this record. Researching “waiting” necessitates practices of attunement to multiple coexisting temporalities and careful processes for handling and holding the temporal material produced by these practices. In this chapter, we share some of what has been learned from experiments in “making time” as a research practice, in which we have had to invent the relations needed to give the temporal a thinkable form. We bring together accounts from three collaborative projects about waiting in health settings, where waiting is fundamentally linked to practices of care. Each project sits within its own discipline (publicly engaged literary studies, artistic practice-as-research, and psychosocial studies), leading researchers to experiment with different forms and concepts through which time as an “object” might be attended to, grasped and indeed “made” in the process.Wellcome Trus

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

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 it 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 article, 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 which 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

Emergency contraception from the pharmacy 20 years on:a mystery shopper study

Background Emergency contraception (EC) was approved in the UK as a pharmacy medicine for purchase without prescription in 1991. Twenty years later we conducted a study to characterise routine practice pharmacy provision of EC. Study design Mystery shopper study of 30 pharmacies in Edinburgh, Dundee and London participating in a clinical trial of contraception after EC. Methods Mystery shoppers, aged ≥16 years, followed a standard scenario requesting EC. After the pharmacy visit, they completed a proforma recording the duration of the consultation, where it took place, and whether advice was given to them about the importance of ongoing contraception after EC. Results Fifty-five mystery shopper visits were conducted. The median reported duration of the consultation with the pharmacist was 6 (range 1–18) min. Consultations took place in a private room in 34 cases (62%) and at the shop counter in the remainder. In 27 cases (49%) women received advice about ongoing contraception. Eleven women (20%) left the pharmacy without EC due to lack of supplies or of a trained pharmacist. Most women were generally positive about the consultation. Conclusions While availability of EC from UK pharmacies has undoubtedly improved access, the necessity to have a consultation, however helpful, with a pharmacist introduces delays and around one in five of our mystery shoppers left without getting EC. Consultations in private are not always possible and little advice is given about ongoing contraception. It is time to make EC available without a pharmacy consultation