Time, care, and crisis – Exeter Workshop
On Monday 14 and Tuesday 15 September 2026, the PSYPARTITIONS project team met for the first time in person to introduce their research, connect with colleagues at the University of Exeter, and discuss some of the core themes of the project.
The workshop was an invaluable opportunity to think through critical concepts from an interdisciplinary perspective, including crisis, care, time, institutionalisation, the border, trauma, and partition.
Over the course of the two days, participants reflected on a set of distinct temporalities and the relationships between them: the time of the political crisis, which might be a time of exception, of decision, a tipping point, unrepeatable; the time of institutional psychiatric care, which might be chronic, repetitive, and predictable even with regards to the recurrence of critical days; and the time of the migrant, the refugee, the exile, which might be experienced as stolen time, non-linear time, or a permanent sense of being out of place.
The definition of care also emerged as a key and complex question. A focus on psychiatric patients shifts us away from cure and prevention, towards care and confinement – terms which are valued differently, not least because of their gendered associations. But how, where, and by whom care is enacted varies significantly, from institutional psychiatric care performed by strangers to care in the community, within the family, or by friends. The relationship between care and a whole host of other terms, including some of its seeming opposites – violence, exclusion, harm, abandonment as well as empathy, compassion, vulnerability – made clear the need to interrogate closely ideas, practices, and relationships of care.
Other important points of discussion included the intersecting processes of (psychiatric) institutionalisation, border-making, and partitioning, while the need for a flexible, careful, and creative approach to recovering the histories of psychiatry in partition contexts was recognised by participants and marked a clear direction for future conversations.
The project team are deeply grateful to everyone who participated in the workshop, and we look forward to continuing these conversations in many different ways in the future. The workshop was also a happy occasion to celebrate not one but two birthdays within the project team – many happy returns to Charlotte Mitchell and Laila Rajani!
