Social Sciences Festival 2026: Waiting Times Book Launch - Professor Lisa Baraitser
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
In a world characterised by 'poly crisis', two major crises stand out: a crisis of time and a crisis of care. This open access book investigates what it means to wait in and for healthcare in an era when care is politicised and rationed and time is lived at increasingly different and complex tempos.
Waiting times within the UK National Health Service (NHS) have been at historic levels through and since the Covid-19 pandemic. Although this sense of a crisis of waiting is culturally and historically specific, it casts important light on the 'crisis' of welfare structures across the Global North. Such a crisis in waiting times brings both a call for judgment and a call to action.
This co-authored book argues that all healthcare entails waiting and other forms of elongated time, such as pausing to observe, staying alongside patients at end of life, or stopping treatment as an ethical intervention. Instead of trying to 'solve' the crisis of the NHS by moving people more quickly through the system, reallocating time to address 'shortfalls' to reduce waits to access care, or even abandoning the social commitment to a universal service, the authors argue that it is vital to pay attention, first, to how time and care continue to be made in the current system. It is only by reckoning with the essential 'untimeliness' of care that we might then be able to conceptualise interventions in the NHS that are 'timely' and that sustain its social mission.
Contact name: External Relations Events
Speakers-
Dr Jordan Osserman
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Dr Jordan Osserman is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and a UKCP registered clinical psychoanalyst His research interests include feminist, queer and critical theory; the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalysis; and the politics of the Left. He is a member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Jordan's doctoral research, a psychoanalytic study of the practice of male circumcision, was published in 2022 with Bloomsbury, entitled Circumcision on the Couch. More recently, he has worked at Birkbeck as a postdoctoral researcher on the Wellcome Trust funded Waiting Times project, researching the role of time in the care of young people struggling with questions around gender. This ongoing research involves an ethnographic study of the UK's only publicly funded health service for young people considering gender transition. He recently edited a special issue of the journal Psychoanalytic Study of the Child on this subject, Transgender Children: From Controversy to Dialogue.
Outside of his academic and clinical work, Jordan serves as Co-President of the Essex branch of University College Union, and also organises with the London Renters Union. He has published collaboratively written reflections on activism during the pandemic in Wellcome Open Research, Radical Philosophy, Viewpoint and Tribune Magazine.
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Dr Michael Flexer
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Dr Michael Flexer studied for a BA at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, before completing an MA in Advanced Theatre Practice at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
After nearly 10 years working as a dramatist with his own small theatre company, and as a practising semiotician, he returned to academia in 2010. He completed an MSc in Medical Humanities at King’s College London and was awarded the inaugural Medical Humanities PhD studentship at the University of Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities in 2012.
His PhD was an interdisciplinary study of cultural, medical and testimonial representations of psychosis. He was cross-supervised by Professor Stuart Murray in the School of English and Professor Allan House in the Institute of Health Sciences.
In 2016, he completed a postdoctoral position at King’s College London with Professor Brian Hurwitz. He then worked in the English department at Sheffield Hallam University from 2016 to 2017, where he convened the psycholinguistics module. Prior to his appointment at the University of Exeter, he was a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London, where he contributed to the design of a new BSc in Medical Sciences with Humanities, Philosophy and Law.
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Jocelyn Catty
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Jocelyn Catty is co-lead for child and adolescent psychotherapy in Bromley CAMHS and a visiting lecturer at the Tavistock Centre.
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Kelechi Anucha
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Kelechi Anucha is a Lecturer in Literature and Environmental Justice at the University of Manchester. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Exeter as part of the Waiting Times Project. Her past and current work explores the impact of environmental crises on individual and planetary health, with a focus on how historic and ongoing forms of harm are distributed along racial lines.
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Professor Laura Salisbury
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Professor Laura Salisbury studied for a BA in English and European Literature at the University of Warwick, before completing an MA in the Theory and Practice of Modern Fiction at the University of Exeter in 1996. She then undertook a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, which she completed in 2003.
From 2003 to 2007, she worked as a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, before being awarded an RCUK Fellowship in Science, Technology and Culture (2007–2013). In 2013, she was appointed Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature.
During her time at Birkbeck, she developed a growing interest in Medical Humanities and, together with her colleague Joanne Winning, established a new MA in Medical Humanities in association with the Kent, Sussex and Surrey NHS Deanery. In 2013, she was appointed Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Literature at the University of Exeter, where she is now Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities.
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Professor Lisa Baraitser
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Lisa Baraitser is Professor in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and a psychotherapist in independent practice. She is author of the award-winning monograph, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009).
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Stephanie Davies
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Stephanie Davies is a postdoctoral research fellow within the department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. She completed her PhD in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London as part of the Waiting Times Project, investigating the ‘watchful waiting’ of general practitioners as a practice of care.
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