Plymouth University researcher Dr Deborah Robinson, associate professor of contemporary art practise is a collaborator on Waiting Times, a major project funded by a Wellcome Trust collaborative Award in Humanities and Social Science.
The project, led by Dr Laura Salisbury, Exeter University and Dr Lisa Baraitser, Birkbeck College, University of London will investigate waiting as a cultural and psychosocial concept, and an embodied and historical experience, to understand the temporalities of healthcare. It represents a fundamental rethinking of the relation between time and care through a critical analysis of waiting in the modern period. Working across medical humanities and psychosocial studies, the project will uncover the history, cultural representation and psychosocial organisation of delayed and impeded time from 1860 to the present.
This work will underpin focused investigations of ‘watchful waiting’ in current general practice, psychotherapy and end of life care. We will ask which models of time operate in healthcare practices and develop new models where waiting can operate as a form of careful attention. We will open up the meanings and difficulties of waiting and reframe debates about waiting for healthcare, moving beyond waiting times in the NHS, towards a more comprehensive understanding of the relation between waiting, care, and changing experiences of time. Deborah will work with experimental film-based processes in an exploration of time and waiting. The artwork produced will be the basis of an exhibition that will tour 3 locations including London and the Southwest of England. A curator will be employed to develop the exhibition programme.