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- Convenors:
-
Lauren Cubellis
(Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Thomas Stodulka (Universität Münster)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
In this panel we examine the negotiation of "temporal horizons" - the parsing of indefinite perspectives subject to immense variation and contingent on local assessments and situated knowledges. How individuals and communities negotiate this divergence has affective resonance and concrete effects.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we examine the negotiation of "temporal horizons" - the parsing of indefinite perspectives subject to immense variation and contingent on local assessments and situated knowledges. Despite being tethered to what seems, at first glance, to be a shared present, the assessment of divergent temporal horizons signals instances in which different actors perceive or prioritize radically disparate concerns because of dissimilar imagined timelines. The temporal proximity, or distance, of future consequences, and the requisite accounting that takes place in the present, thus shapes practices and narratives according to causal logics that are not necessarily shared or collectively acknowledged. How individuals and communities negotiate this divergence has both affective resonance and concrete effects. For example, in clinical encounters, considerations of crisis and recovery can be meaningfully understood over the life course, while for reimbursing insurance companies the most important horizon is short-term cost-effectiveness. These different horizons have significant consequences for patient care, and for the affective arrangement of clinical practice. In education, the development of programs built on 'aspirational', 'visionary', and 'sustainable' ideals connects young people to a global future, yet may be out of step with infrastructural or bureaucratic limitations in the present. Drawing on ethnographic contexts ranging from crisis resolution, to public health, to education and beyond, this panel examines how asynchronous assessments of temporal horizons create different values, priorities, and concerns regarding the pursuit of common "goals" or outcomes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Clinicians working with dialogic practice in Germany take on the task of orienting their clients to a slower, more ambivalent temporality of care than is generally found in biomedical treatment models. This involves reconfiguring risk, uncertainty, and the imagined future of a life with crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Clinicians working with dialogic practice in Germany take on the task of creating a temporal space for crisis care that is slower, more ambivalent, and more uncertain than the "anticipatory regimes" (Adams et al. 2009) of biomedical treatment-as-usual. As a response to crisis, dialogic practice aims to slow down processes of diagnosis, medication, and hospitalization, which are often the first recourse for biomedical providers. The community-based crisis team that I worked with learn this alternative temporality over years of practice and training, yet they continue to inhabit a marginalized position in the broader landscape of care in their city. This is, in many ways, because the insurance providers they partner with oscillate between admiring a slower approach to crisis (one they believe would reduce hospitalization costs) and the desire to control and contain crisis as soon as it occurs (a kind of security offered in hospital settings). This results in clashing conceptions of "risk": the risk of psychiatric crisis, of medication, of hospitalization, of slowing down, of imagining the possibility of recovery. These risks - as they are variously identified by insurers, hospitals, dialogic clinicians, and clients - present as incommensurate or irreconcilable because they are differently positioned in the broader temporal ecology of psychiatric care (Duclos and Criado 2019). These actors actually share the same goals in many respects, yet the divergences between their short and long term horizons of care mean they often end up working at cross-purposes while attuned to radically different conceptions of risk.
Paper short abstract:
This paper questions the various and conflicting temporal strategies of managing uncertainty in a Swiss psychiatric hospital, by distinguishing discursive axes and positionalities within its institutional network.
Paper long abstract:
This paper questions the various and conflicting temporal strategies of managing uncertainty in a Swiss mental psychiatric in which I did a seven months fieldwork, by distinguishing discursive axes and positionalities within its institutional network. Anthropology literature towards the temporal directionality driving human action evokes the idea of a potential that is yet to be realized, a vision that provides direction (e.g. Gammeltoft 2013). Uncertainty and doubt, however, constitute important parts of experiential directionality; their study is not only central to understand the subjective experiential temporalities of social actors, but also to better grasp how they navigate their social environments (Pelkmans 2013). Subjective attitude towards the future is an essential part of the everyday lives of psychiatric patients - see for example Frantzen 2019, who understands depression as a "chronopathology" -, but uncertainty is also foundational in everyday social interactions in mental health hospitals, as testified by the recurring vocabulary of risk reduction that is prevalent in these environments. In the Swiss hospital X, the different ways of dealing with uncertainty, distinguished through several discursive axes, are inscribed in conflicting and hierarchical rhythms and timescapes (Bear 2016); they impact health practitioners as well as patients' subjectivities and bodies, viewed as dialectic and unfinished products of discursive regimes (Wade, 2004).
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how people with dementia and their family members try to find the "right" time for euthanasia by negotiating divergent horizons. This involves negotiating the temporal distance between present and future, in which the future demands action now, while being held off as a "not yet."
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I show how people with dementia and their family members, in trying to find the "right" time for euthanasia, negotiated divergent horizons and the extent to which they considered the future to be imminent. For many interlocutors in my ethnographic research on the end of life with dementia in the Netherlands, the imagined future with dementia was a reason to request euthanasia, which they saw as a way to prevent an otherwise inevitable, and apocalyptic future. However, timing euthanasia with dementia is extremely difficult and often results in the deferral of established boundaries. In requesting euthanasia, the person with dementia needs to define and confirm the boundaries of what they consider a life (not) worth living.
In this process, divergent temporal horizons emerge as perspectives and insights differ between people with dementia, their family members, and medical professionals, as to the timelines of when and how these boundaries are approaching or being reached. Collaboratively, they seek to navigate the agonizing trade-off between being 'too early' for euthanasia and the fear of being 'too late,' continually testing out images of the unwanted future against changing circumstances in the present. Hence, contributing to an emerging anthropology of temporality, I argue that the negotiation between differing temporal imaginaries involves a process of establishing, collapsing, and renegotiating the temporal distance between present and future, in which the imagined future demands and legitimizes action now, while also being held off as a continuous 'not yet.'
Paper short abstract:
What are the processes occurring in conflict-divided societies after truth commissions and tribunals end? This paper explores competing timelines, scales of actions, and priorities people place in the processes of peace and healing after massive violence among the East Timorese.
Paper long abstract:
On a global scale, post-conflict interventions rely heavily on future-oriented actions designed to confront painful memories of the past. The mechanisms aimed at assisting societies in transition operate within strict constraints of time, mandate, and funding. On the other hand, the afterlife of violence remains in and goes beyond the present, sediments in the landscape and the emotional terrains (dis)connecting everyday relations. The ways individuals and societies deal with the past occur at a different pace and scale from how external actors and nation-states conceive peace and healing. Non-human factors shape these processes profoundly. Thus, as one survivor of a village massacre stated, "You cannot rush us to reconcile. Reconciliation is as much a matter for the dead as it is for the living."
What are the implications of conflicting temporalities of peace and healing in everyday societal, cultural and political life? What are the processes occurring in conflict-divided communities after truth commissions and tribunals end? How can we conceptualise these processes in contemporary anthropological thinking? This paper draws on long-term ethnographic work among the East Timorese and explores competing timelines, scales of actions, and priorities people place in processes of peace and healing after massive violence.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I examine the negotiation of "temporal horizons" between migrants seasonal workers and their employers, other workers and social operators. Migrants'condition of displacement produces a deep sense of uncertainty but is also assessed as a transitionary phase in their life course
Paper long abstract:
Multiple structural forces constrain migrants in general and refugees and asylum seekers in particular from using their capacities and making free choices: enduring displacing forces hinder return; marginalising forces prevent local social inclusion; immobilising forces block chances to seek a future elsewhere. However they develop diverse strategies to navigate through governance regimes: home-making attempts, resistance to existing power hierarchies and imaginations of a future 'elsewhere' are all expressions of displaced persons' agency-in-waiting (Mielke, 2016). Starting from life histories collected among asylum seekers employed as seasonal workers in Northern Italy, I analyse their different temporalities of displacement, defined as their personal and social appropriation of time and I enquire how they make sense of their condition of uncertainty and protractedness. On the one hand, legal uncertainty is experienced as a lack of protection, existential uncertainty and social marginalisation. On the other hand, they regard their condition as a transitionary phase in the cycle of displacement, and indeed in their life courses. In this way they enact their agency-in-waiting while making their futures based on their everyday practices and social relations. Their assessments of temporal horizons is profoundly different from the assessment of other social actors with whom they interact, as their employers, autochthonous workers, or social operators employed in reception centres. These divergences could produce misunderstandings and conflicts in everyday interactions and to worsen the experience of protractedness.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the entanglement of divergent temporal and affective horizons in international medical work contexts of the "More-Doctors-for-Brazil" program. Sensitive emergent socialities between Cubans and Brazilians create moments for envisioning a dignified living despite crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Between 2013 and 2018, Cuba maintained one of its largest cooperation with Brazil: nearly 18,000 Cuban health professional were sent to work within the framework of the Brazilian health program "More-Doctors for Brazil", to cover the state of emergency in the Brazilian precarious public healthcare system. These kind of South-South partnerships garnered increased attention in the last few years as they are considered as welcome alternative in the international aid system due to shared experiences of postcolonial pasts and neo-colonial dependencies in the present. Considering 'crisis' as enduring condition of living rather than an exception, South-South partnerships thereby introduced divergent notions of time and temporalities of international aid. However, challenging established temporal notions of crisis also raises the question of a divergent temporality of care.
In this paper, I will take a closer look at the entanglement of divergent temporal and affective dimensions of experiences, narrations, and interactions in this international constellation of caregiving. Based on findings of a 15-month hospital ethnography in marginalized areas of Rio de Janeiro, I will focus on local encounters and emergent socialities between Cuban physicians, Brazilian patients and medical staff. I will show that the sensitive moments of interaction -sensitive in regard to the embodied, emplaced, and political dimension of past and present- hold the possibility of a fragile intersubjectivity that creates its own temporal and affective dynamics, undermining, at least for moments, powerful regimes of care by disclosing the horizon of a dignified living despite crisis while enabling a vision of future.