Waiting Times: Waiting and care in the time of modernity. (360G-Wellcome-108251_Z_15_Z)

Seed funding is sought for the development work that will lead to a joint Investigator Award Application by Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck) and Laura Salisbury (Exeter) that investigates waiting time in relation to mental health, clinical contact time, and care. The project will bring together perspectives from medical humanities, medical history, psychosocial studies, literary studies, and new studies of temporality, to think critically about waiting times in mental healthcare provision, the time-spa ce of the GP encounter, and practices of care for the very elderly. Using an emerging scholarship that reformulates the speed and mobility commonly associated with modernity by emphasizing slowness and stilled, impeded or suspended time, the project investigates contemporary experiences of waiting in clinical and care encounters in what are felt to be increasingly frenetic times. Seed funding will enable a) a scoping study to be completed on the history of managing waiting in the NHS, from 1948- present day; b) the development of the conceptual resources on temporality that will underpin the Investigator Award Application through teaching buy-out, meetings, networking and conference attendance by the two co-investigators; c) the development of partnerships with those who will have a stake in the research outputs of project.