Temporal Practices and Risk
In this presentation we will introduce the novel concept of temporal practices as a way to understand risks in everyday life. We apply the concept to health practices in households with young children and the way parents deal with health risks for their children and themselves.
We suggest that temporal practices emerge at the conflicting intersections of unequal and dominant institutions, family histories and everyday experiences. Temporal practices are directed at future time and draw together unequally organized meaning, materiality, knowledge and emotion. While time has been a dimension in many practice-based approaches, and prior theories have considered time as an outcome of practices (Shove, Schatzki, Southerton), this paper uniquely focuses on practices explicitly concerned with or directed at time itself. We argue that temporal practices arise from humans' dual engagement with time: both as a subjective flow or immersive experience and as an object of intervention and management (Plessner, Wehrle). Moreover, the power of dominant institutional rhythms can resonate in every life yet also triggers dissonance, leave daily life unbothered or trigger micro political attempts to change dominating rhythms. While temporal practices merit attention in themselves, they also bundle and delineate other practices.
Based on this conceptual frame, we collaboratively analyze the everyday lives in households with children aged 0-4. We ethnographically and longitudinally follow everyday health practices and focus on the way caretakers work towards risk mitigation and relate to dominant public health interventions and healthist norms. Particularly the gendered and unequal ways parents juggle their own and children’s health risk will be scrutinized. Applying the concept of temporal practices helps to go beyond the identification of contradictions between institutional risk frames and local experiences to show which patterns emerge when young families are navigating risks.