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- Convenors:
-
Anna Mann
(University of Zurich)
Nolwenn Bühler (University of Lausanne)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Against the backdrop of every-expanding health costs, a growing population of elderly, lack of staff, and new forms of antimicrobial resistances, this panel investigates how limits to health intersect with temporalities, and how both might be cared for to produce a more-than-now worth living in.
Description
Public discourses paint a gloomy future for health. In the face of ever-expanding health costs, an ageing population with complex health needs, the shortage of healthcare staff, new forms of antimicrobial resistance, and environmental pollutions, the health systems of well-off European countries seem to reach their limits. What has made the success of modern technology-driven biomedicine nowadays increasingly yields unintended consequences and unravels its fragilities.
STS has a long tradition of bringing out how limits materialize in different ways (biological, physical, bodily, spatial, institutional, or legal); emerge from heterogenous, hybrid practices; are negotiated, contested, or resisted; and yield particular effects for different human and non-human actors involved. This panel focuses on the intersection of limits and time, with a specific attention to caring practices for both. We are interested in how enactments of limits connect pasts, presents and futures, how they become embedded in specific temporal regimes and timescapes, and how caring for limits generates ‘nows’ and ‘more-than-nows’.
The panel invites contributions drawing on empirical research related to human and more-than-human health addressing questions such as:
- How are limits made visible, tangible, and known? Through which tools or objects, and in which assemblages?
- On whose terms is something “a limit” or “a frontier”? How do limits relate to new frontiers? How do frontiers turn into limits or limits reframe frontiers?
- In knowing limits which temporalities are relied upon? How is time consumed and produced? Whose time and where? Which pasts, presents and futures are made possible? Which are rendered absent?
- How are limits cared for, cherished and fostered, or neglected and dismissed? And how can we, as STS scholars, empirically, analytically, and politically contribute to caring for limits in futures that are worth living in?