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Paper short abstract

Aggressive behavior forms a limit condition within institutional care arrangements. I analyze the “escalating situation” as a temporal device transforming care practices by enacting specific relations between past, present and future.

Paper long abstract

Aggressive behavior and physical violence form a limit condition for staff in health and welfare services, transgressing institutional mandates and professional skill sets. At the same time, it can index ways in which institutional care provision is limited and limiting. In this contribution I draw on ethnographic engagement with de-escalation trainings and practices in German health and welfare services. A professional approach to instances of aggression, these efforts center the “escalating situation” as an object of caring and securitizing intervention. My contribution examines how the escalating situation becomes productive as a frame, and more specifically, a temporal device. Working with escalating situations, I show, sets them apart as a circumscribed space of intervention, while also crafting connections between past, present and future care practices. As a scenario, the escalating situation enables temporal logics of security, which can work to change care practices in the now in anticipation of a potential future risk. But care practioners also create epistemic links between escalating situations, to open them up as experimental space and learn from past situations for future situations. Working as container device, meanwhile, the escalating situation can enact temporal logics of crisis, setting an urgent now apart from the routine everyday life and institutional constraints within which it emerges. By examining these temporal dynamics, I show the various ways in which escalating situations come to be limiting to care, a frontier of care practices, or a limit of care.