'Between-time stories': waiting, war and the temporalities of care.

This article analyses how World War II shifted and contained embodied experiences of waiting in relation to broader ideas of lived time in modernity. The trench warfare of World War I has often been imagined as a limit experience of anxious waiting, but World War II produced compelling accounts of experiences of suspended time in civilian populations exposed to the threat and anticipation of 'total war'. This article analyses representations of this suspended present drawn from Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf, alongside materials in the Mass Observation Archive, to develop an account of how exposure to a future shaped by the potential of annihilation from the air reshaped experiences of durational temporality and the timescapes of modernity in the London Blitz. It also explores the relationship between anxiety, waiting, and care by attending to psychoanalytic theories that developed in the wartime work of Wilfred Bion and Melanie Klein. Extending Freud's account of anxiety as producing 'yet time', this article describes how and why both literary and psychoanalytic texts came to understand waiting and thinking with others as creating the conditions for taking care of the future.

On not being able to read: doomscrolling and anxiety in pandemic times.

This article analyses 'doomscrolling', or the compulsive reading of anxiety-inducing online content during the COVID-19 pandemic, against the common idea that it is simply an addictive social practice that impedes mental flourishing. Instead, in order to open up its inclination towards care, I read doomscrolling through the anachronistic neologism that has come to define this specifically textual practice. Tracing the operations that doomscrolling and anxiety perform on lived time, the article uses the work of Eugène Minkowski, Sigmund Freud, Lauren Berlant, Walter Benjamin, and Lisa Baraitser to examine how these practices hope to take care of time when narratives of progressive history have worn thin. I include analyses of the anxious textuality of Don DeLillo's The Silence and Saidiya Hartman's reworking of W. E. B. Du Bois's 'The Comet' to demonstrate how doomscrolling emerges from a moment when trust is anxiously fractured, but how it works, nevertheless, to witness what gets to count when time is felt to be coming to an end.

'What about the coffee break?': Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality.

Geography, like many other disciplines, is reckoning with the carbon intensity of its practices and rethinking how activities such as annual meetings are held. The Climate Action Task Force of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), for example, was set up in 2019 and seeks to transform the annual conference in light of environmental justice concerns. Mirroring shifts it geographic practice across the globe, these efforts point to a need to understand how new opportunities for knowledge production such as online events can operate effectively. In this article, we offer suggestions for best practice in virtual spaces arising from our Material Life of Time conference held in March 2021, a two day global event that ran synchronously across 15 time zones. Given concerns about lack of opportunities for informal exchanges at virtual conferences, or the "coffee break problem", we designed the event to focus particularly on opportunities for conviviality. This was accomplished through a focus on three key design issues: the spatial, the temporal and the social. We review previous work on the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous and asynchronous online conference methods and the kinds of geographic communities they might support. We then describe our design approach and reflect on its effectiveness via a variety of feedback materials. We show that our design enabled high delegate satisfaction, a sense of conviviality, and strong connections with new colleagues. However we also discuss the problems with attendance levels and external commitments which hampered shared time together. We thus call for collective efforts to support the 'event time' of online meetings, rather than expectations to fit them around everyday tasks. Even so, our results suggest that synchronous online events need not result in geographical exclusions linked to time zone differences, and we outline further recommendations for reworking the spacetimes of the conference.

'Containment, delay, mitigation': waiting and care in the time of a pandemic.

In this paper, we take up three terms - containment, delay, mitigation - that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy - contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects - we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero's notion of 'horrorism', in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures  within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-century history - World War II - that was also concerned with an existential threat requiring a response from a whole population. Our purpose is not to invoke a fantasised narrative of 'Blitz spirit', but to suggest that the British psychoanalytic tradition born of that moment offers resources for understanding how to keep thinking while 'under fire' through containing unbearable anxiety and the capacity for violence in the intersubjective space and time between people. In conditions of lockdown and what will be a long and drawn-out 'after life' of COVID-19, this commitment to thinking in and with delay and containment might help to inhabit this time of waiting - waiting that is the management and mitigation of a future threat, but also a time of care in and for the present.

Waiting and Care in Pandemic Times Collection.

This editorial introduces a collection of research articles and reflections on what it means to wait during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written from conditions of lockdown, this collection gathers together the initial thoughts of a group of interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have been working on questions of waiting and care through a project called  Waiting Times.

Healthy publics: enabling cultures and environments for health.

Despite extraordinary advances in biomedicine and associated gains in human health and well-being, a growing number of health and well-being related challenges have remained or emerged in recent years. These challenges are often 'more than biomedical' in complexion, being social, cultural and environmental in terms of their key drivers and determinants, and underline the necessity of a concerted policy focus on generating healthy societies. Despite the apparent agreement on this diagnosis, the means to produce change are seldom clear, even when the turn to health and well-being requires sizable shifts in our understandings of public health and research practices. This paper sets out a platform from which research approaches, methods and translational pathways for enabling health and well-being can be built. The term 'healthy publics' allows us to shift the focus of public health away from 'the public' or individuals as targets for intervention, and away from the view that culture acts as a barrier to efficient biomedical intervention, towards a greater recognition of the public struggles that are involved in raising health issues, questioning what counts as healthy and unhealthy and assembling the evidence and experience to change practices and outcomes. Creating the conditions for health and well-being, we argue, requires an engaged research process in which public experiments in building and repairing social and material relations are staged and sustained even if, and especially when, the fates of those publics remain fragile and buffeted by competing and often more powerful public formations.

Jackson's Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language.

This article explores the relationship between automatic and involuntary language in the work of Samuel Beckett and late nineteenth-century neurological conceptions of language that emerged from aphasiology. Using the work of John Hughlings Jackson alongside contemporary neuroscientific research, we explore the significance of the lexical and affective symmetries between Beckett's compulsive and profoundly embodied language and aphasic speech automatisms. The interdisciplinary work in this article explores the paradox of how and why Beckett was able to search out a longed-for language of feeling that might disarticulate the classical bond between the language, intention, rationality and the human, in forms of expression that seem automatic and "readymade".