Tervetuloa kuuntelemaan Professori Lisa Baraitserin keynote-esitelmää (esitelmä on englanninkielinen):
Deathly care, timely death: touching time in Kirsten Johnson’s ‘Dick Johnson is Dead’
Chair: Dr Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Turku, FI)
Discussant: Dr Annukka Lahti (University of Eastern Finland, FI)
Time: Thursday February 19, 10.15-11.45 (EET, Helsinki time)
Venue: Aava lecture hall at the University of Turku (Arcanum, Arcanuminkuja 1, 20500 Turku)
Livestream: http://bit.ly/3MJgPAr
The keynote lecture is part of the symposium: Time, Violence, and the Ethics of Care: Psychosocial Perspectives (February 19-20, 2026, University of Turku)
Lisa Baraitser:
Deathly care, timely death: touching time in Kirsten Johnson’s ‘Dick Johnson is Dead’
Abstract:
What does it mean to wait or to slow? And what does it mean for time to elongate now, in historical and socio-political conditions in which the possibility of the arrival of what one is waiting for, of having one’s needs met, for instance, feels increasingly unlikely for the global majority. What does it mean particularly for those living with chronic conditions, including mental health conditions, alongside all those inhabiting the chronic condition of the current ‘polycrisis’, where one crisis overturns the next with alarming predictability? Drawing on work developed by Waiting Times, a five-year interdisciplinary research project that sought to understand this complex relation between waiting and care, I continue to think about the efficacy of paying close attention to the possibilities, both painful and hopeful, of delayed, interrupted, and suspended time. Although, in the context of healthcare, waiting is typically associated with service insufficiency or inefficiency, and sometimes with forms of institutional violence and neglect, Waiting Times revealed how care does not only happen when waiting stops; rather, waiting is the ubiquitous but hard to grasp time within which much ordinary care gets delivered. Waiting with an other during end-of-life care can enable a vital elongation or deepening of the time that is left; waiting allows a body to respond in its own time to a new medication; it can be the ‘hovering and adjusting’ of intensive care, of home care, of rehabilitation. Attending, in an ongoing way, to an other’s needs and rhythms, the time of waiting with others necessarily withdraws from ideas or experiences of achievement, overcoming, deliverance, or cure – it sticks instead with ordinary, hard to register, ongoing practices of maintenance and endurance. In this talk I develop this notion of waiting through an engagement with the Kirsten Johnson’s 2020 documentary film Dick Johnson is Dead. Dick, a former psychiatrist, is coming towards the end of his life, with the inevitable needs for care that arise. Together, Dick and Kirsten hilariously and poignantly stage Dick’s death again and again as a way to collaboratively ‘take care’ of Dick’s ‘end times’. Dick’s death is never ‘on time’ until it is too late, yet care emerges through the making together of intergenerational time.
Bio:
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London, and a psychoanalyst in practice in London. She is author of the award winning monograph Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) and Enduring Time (2017) and has written widely on time, care and psychoanalysis. From 2018-2024 she was the co-Principal Investigator of Waiting Times, a Wellcome Trust funded research project about care and waiting in the UK health service. In 2025 she was awarded a Discovery Award from Wellcome (£3.85 million) to undertake a multi-site interdisciplinary project called Contragestive Time, on the future of fertility control.
For inquiries about the event, please contact Daria Kosinova (daria.kosinova@utu.fi)
The event is co-organised by three Research Council of Finland funded projects:
Networked Care: Intimate Matters in Online Mental Health Support (2023-2027, PI: Marjo Kolehmainen, University of Turku)
Gendered Ethics of Reproductive Time: Science, Technology and the Market (2024-2028, PI Riikka Homanen, University of Lapland)
Asymmetric Encounters: Intersubjectivity And The Sense Of Boundaries (2022–2026, PI Joona Taipale, University of Jyväskylä)