Chaired by Ingrid Eskild
This proposed open panel, titled 'Temporalities of care,' wishes to address the ongoing discussion of temporality. Care is understood in its broadest sense, as any relation that requires care and consideration outside the confines of symmetry. This includes of course what we traditionally consider care relations, but also other social, environmental, historical or bodily relations that somehow involves care. The panel invites reflections on the intersections of time and care in environmental humanities and environmental ethics, disability studies, history of concepts and cultural history, among others. Overall, we wish to examine how contemporary care studies tackle problems of time, how the latest research working with the concept of care reframes our understanding of time, and how these areas of research engage with different philosophical traditions studying the human experience.
Ada Arendt
My paper offers a comparative overview of temporality in the two influential discourses centred around the notion of care: the Heideggerian tradition and the feminist ethics of care in order to examine their points of contact. Those two schools of thought rarely engage in dialogue, but share interest in the widely discussed antique anthropogenic myth of Cura, the female personification of care molding the first human from muddy clay. In my paper, I will discuss different interpretations of this myth with their temporal implications.
Bio: Ada Arendt is a historian of culture and postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, History and Conservation at the University of Oslo, currently engaging with early modern environmental history, temporality and the concept of care.
Giulia Carabelli & Dawn Lyon: The time and rhythms of plant care: new trajectories
This paper draws on the results of "Care for Plants", an ongoing project about plant-care during the Covid-19 pandemic. "Care for Plants" gathered original empirical data on the ‘plant-craze’ to explore mundane practices of plant care, the impact of caring for plants for everyday life, the experience of living in social isolation with plants in domestic space, and novel engagements with plants and nonhuman life at a planetary scale (in time and space). Central to these new human-plant relations was a concern with time – including taking time to care, attuning to the rhythms of plant life, establishing the temporal belonging of plants, and envisaging the future anew. In our paper, we analyse how time spent caring for plants shape human-plant affective relations to discuss the meanings of making time with plants at home. Specifically, we reflect on the ethical and political potentials of plant care during lockdowns. We draw on Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s and Anna Krzywoszynska’s work on soil-care to discuss caring for plants as the manifestation of radical trajectories that shape through time to comment on the emergence of new understandings of time that refuse neoliberal rhythms and tempos.
The paper draws on data generated through qualitative interviews with plant carers at two points in time - during and after lockdowns in 2020 and 2022. First, we discuss plant-care as the practice of re-making time in lockdown. Second, we discuss time with plants as the making of affective bonds between species that depend on practices of care to focus on how “affective inhabitation can generate forms of attentiveness, connection and care that transform sensing into an activity which has a range of political and ethical implications” (Pedwell 2021, 27). We look more closely at the legacy of lockdowns to understand what humans learnt from living with plants in social isolation and beyond. Here, we explore plant-care as a practice that instructed new responsibilities towards the plants: something one needs to make time for, which results in a different understanding of time and its value. In the final part, we position our empirical data within the broader literature on the transformative potential of everyday life in dialogue with the work of Lefebvre (2004), Manning (2016), and Pedwell (2021). This leads us to explore plant care as the making of new habits and routines that can reshape our understanding of the present or, following Manning (2016) and Pedwell, “social change in a minor key” (Pedwell 2021, 8). Responding to Myers’ (2021) urgent call to learn how “to conspire with the plants” in order to build together a better future, we consider everyday rhythms as the ground from which to envision multi-species worldmaking practices that decentre human agency in favour of more-than-human appreciation and collaboration.
Bio: Giulia Carabelli is a lecturer in sociology at Queen Mary, University of London. Her current research investigates human-houseplants relationships during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dawn Lyon is reader in sociology at the University of Kent. Her research is in the sociology of work, time and everyday life.
Halvor Hanisch
The relation between temporality and disability – and, likewise, the relation between temporality and care – are still underexplored. Nevertheless, recent research has provided at least two analytical terms that have gained prevalence: Crip time and care time, respectively. However, these research frontiers rarely interact: While crip time is individualized, the issue of care and temporality is almost exclusively investigated in the lives of carers who are themselves not considered persons with disabilities. It is also worth noting that research on crip time mainly deal with people with physical and sensory impairments, and often emphasize the experiences of adults.
However, people with disabilities are often carers. Hence, crip time and care time do co-occur. In this autotheoretical paper, I try to unpack this interaction. As a person with physical disabilities – and also the father of a boy with severe cognitive impairments – I have three aims with such an exploration: (1) to conceptualize a notion of care woven time – a notion that can hopefully illuminate how otherwise different structures of care hold together various temporalities; (2) to outline how the knowledge gathered here can further the theoretical work on crip time and care time, respectively; and (3) to make a few suggestions on how the multiple significances of care can give a dialogue between disability studies and care studies.
Bio: Halvor Hanisch is professor of citizenship, disability, and rehabilitation (VID Specialized University), and research professor (Work Research Institute, Oslomet). Trained as a literary scholar, and later as a sociologist, Hanisch has been engaged in disability studies for many years. Hanisch is also former editor-in-chief of Scandinavian Journal for Disability Research and engaged with the disability field in Norway in numerous ways.
Janike Kampevold Larsen: A Matter of Time: Empetrum Nigrum vs indigenous landscape practices in a warming Arctic
Abstract for individual papers or for panel themes (3000 characters max.) Native and indigenous landscape practices are founded in century-long traditions of care for the landscape harvested from. A well-measured outtake of berries, burning wood, meat and fish have contributed to well-balanced ecologies of human and non-human actors. These practices unfold in a cyclical seasonal time, and the human practices is attuned to this temporality. The Sámi concept of meahcci speaks of landscape, not as a visually configured tract of land, but as a temporal constitution of landscape as valuable and resourceful. It refers to practices that unfold a relational and temporal space, to a relational fluidity where the human and the non-human meet in a doing of landscape, both by reindeer and people, that is characterized by a moving through. In this paper this temporal doing will be contrasted to another temporal doing, by a plant that is threatening to disrupt the cyclical practices in the Finnmark landscape.
As climate change is propelling and temperatures rise, some species ‘misbehave’: Empetrum nigrum (en: crowberry, no: krekling) is one such species and is triumphantly winning the competition for habitat and progressing to deteriorate reindeer grazing pastures all over Finnmark, the northernmost county in Norway. The cyclical time of balanced ecosystems seems to be disrupted by the more linear time of a species that seems to have reached an apex in its lifecycle. This paper discusses its impact on indigenous landscape practices and its possible impact on municipal management of area. It argues that care-taking as an attentive action is necessary, and discusses prescribed fire as 'hard' management of Empetrum in relation especially to Annemarie Mol’s idea of tinkering as an experimental care practice where efforts to find solutions to health issues sometimes is a process that involves failing and suffering. Prescribed fire represents an acute involvement with Empetrum’s timeline and prompts a discussion of the temporality of ecosystems out of joint in relation to notions of time in care practices.
The paper is written by a landscape and environmental humanities researcher on a biology project, To Manage or Not: Assessing the benefit of managing ecosystem disservices (MONEC). Preliminary scientific finding by MONEC indicates that Empetrum nigrum is thriving so well with rising temperatures that is seems to out-compete other species, herbs and berries alike. This deteriorates foraging condition as well as grazing pastures. Surveys are based on source material establish by Finnish biologist Mattias Haapasaari in 1970 and show that Empetrum has increased from 20% till 80 % in the Hapaasaari plots over the last 50 years, and the biomass of the plant has doubled over the last two decades. This implies that one species may have the capacity to change an entire region, upend indigenous landscape practices, and deplete ecosystems that are important CO2 sinks. A species that seeded itself 150 years ago, has now reached a point where it grows faster than ever, both because it has multiplied its points of growth and because it seems to respond better to increasing temperature. It is clonal, poisonous and growing extremely quickly, which means its mass is expanding as a product of propelled growth time and is forming a material layer in the terrain that is changing it profoundly.
Within an environmental humanities context this article discusses how care practices in a manifest ecosystem might foster endurance both of ecosystems in a changing climate and of the landscape practices that are part of them
Bio: Janike Kampevold Larsen is professor of landscape theory in The Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Institute of Urbanisme and Landscape. Fo the last ten years she has been researching the changes in and materialities of Arctic landscapes. Currently she is working on a circular and balanced management of areas under pressure in the Varanger region.