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Paper Short Abstract:

What temporalities at play in the healthcare of marginalized individuals, both dependent on the welfare State and seen as hard to reach? Based on a study of trajectories of ill inmates in France, this paper describes two of processes that structure the government of marginalized populations.

Paper Abstract:

The biographical trajectories of Iliès, and the other 18 men living with the hepatitis C or HIV I met in prison, are rife with the effects of addiction, including incarceration and precariousness. Through series of individual interviews before and after prison release, a survey and observations of the work and interactions in the healthcare and charities they frequented, I became interested in the role of time as a practice and a system of power in the evolution of their social situations. Temporalities, as in what we do in and with time, became one of the main foci of the biographical analysis.

What are the temporalities at play in the healthcare of marginalized citizens, as a group both dependent on the welfare State and its institutions and considered as hard to reach? Based on a study of the health and care trajectories of incarcerated men living with the hepatitis C virus in France, this paper shows that the experiences of patients and the expectations of professionals diverge, creating asynchronies and discriminating categories of treatment. These categories emerge as individuals are unable to respond to the conflicting demands of State health and welfare institutions. This paper will show these demands are the sign of the broader political processes of subjectivation and injunctions to autonomy and responsibility that structure the government of marginalized populations. This paper uses temporalities as a social analyser, not only as a driver of power hierarchies and inequities, but also as a social system of power itself.