Lisa Baraitser

One major strand of my research has centred on the fraught relations, as well as creative tensions, between motherhood, female subjectivities and ethics. I am interested in different ways of understanding the conjunction ‘maternal ethics’, especially what ‘mothering’ does to our concepts of care, labour and subjectivity if we strip normative and idealised figurations out of mothering itself. How, in other words, might we think about maternal subjectivity as an utterly new position of experience, that goes on to challenge and deform our understandings of singularity and relatedness, ethics and care, encounter and event? I draw on debates in contemporary psychoanalysis, feminist and social theory, the ethics of care, and philosophies of otherness and event to articulate this unique subject position. I am also interested in the use of autobiographical writing, anecdote, and other literary forms as ways of generating theory. A monograph entitled Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009) draws this work together. More recent maternal research focuses on what happens when mothering ‘erupts’ into the public sphere, prompting us to think about the public anew. I run an international research network – Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE - see MaMSIE.org) - which organises events and publishes a scholarly online journal, Studies in the Maternal, in collaboration with Sigal Spigel at the University of Cambridge. A second area of my research focuses on the psychosocial, particularly its epistemological and methodological dimensions. This includes work on the relation between psychoanalysis as a theoretical and clinical practice, and debates on affect, emotions, ethics, performance and the emerging discipline of psychosocial studies itself. My current work is on gender and temporality. I’m interested in time that fails to unfold, and the place of this kind of ‘stuck’ time in a capitalist conditions in which time has been reduced more and more to the ‘qualified’ time of work. Climate change, unending violent conflict, fraying material infrastructures, permanent debt and widening social inequalities mean that we no longer live with an expectation of a progressive future, a generative past, or a flourishing now that characterized the temporal imaginaries of the post-war period. Time, it appears, is not flowing, but has become ntensely felt, yet radically suspended. My recent monograph, Enduring Time (Bloomsbury, 2017) raises the question of how we might now 'take care' of time? How can we understand change as requiring time not passing? What can quotidian experiences of suspended time - waiting, delaying, staying, remaining, enduring, returning and repeating - tell us about the survival of social bonds? And how might we re-establish the idea that time might be something we both have and share, as opposed to something we are always running out of?I am co-Principal Investigator on a major collaborative award from the Wellcome Trust entitled 'Waiting Times' that is investigating the relation between time and care in the health service from a humanities perspective. See waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk.
Address: London, London, City of, United Kingdom