Surveying "The Waiting Room"

Trans Internet Zeitschrift Fur Kulturwissenschaften, 2011

One of the main ways in which in-between time-spaces are organised and materialised in the urban environment is through waiting places. In this article we point to the transformative potential of waiting places, their role as actors in an urban web, and discuss briefly their societal role in recent historical changes. Public waiting places are today increasingly becoming pre-programmed: connected to other designed environments and integrated into a consumer context, thus losing part of their traditional role in the production of public domain as places for waiting. However, waiting is also to a great extent something experienced as a result of nonprogrammed events, something that can occur without warning, and has to be handled cognitively. In the article we use insights from the field of material semiotics as well as from attention theory, in order to suggest a model of waiting stages that describe the changing roles, and agencies, of these in-between time-spaces, situated as they are in the urban net of people's daily activities.

Waiting territories in the Americas. Life in the Intervals of Migration and Urban transit, 2016

In collective representations of waiting, those who wait are not described as active. Yet, the social practices of the individuals and groups who find themselves stranded on waiting territories belie the passivity which is generally associated with waiting: in such situations, people actually engage in multiple activities, whether or not what they do is in any way related to their immediate predicament. Everything depends on the type of wait (is it formal or informal, institutional or unplanned, desired or endured?), and on the status of both the person who waits and the place where he or she waits (was it designed for waiting or did it become a waiting place as a result of circumstances ― i.e. by default?).1 This chapter focuses on the experience of waiting: that is to say, on the more or less enjoyable interactions that actors and subjects are to a greater or lesser degree constrained to have with each other when they have to spend an indeterminate period of time waiting.

Dialektika , 2023

This article critically analyses the conventional conception of waiting processes, understood exclusively as temporality, examining their limitations in capturing the complexity of waiting as a broader social phenomenon. Drawing on the philosophical paradigm of Discontinuist Materialism, it argues that waiting time must be understood as more than a singular, ontologically negative, and necessarily detrimental phenomenon. The text underlines the intricate relations between waiting time and other aspects of social life, suggesting the need to broaden the perspectives of analysis hitherto employed. It reveals the need for a new analytical framework incorporating social, cultural, and historical factors when examining waiting processes. This article aims to take another step towards reconfiguring the temporal dimension of waiting, paving the way for constructing a more nuanced approach to this multifaceted phenomenon

, 2020

Waiting is an inescapable part of life in modern societies. We all wait, albeit differently and for different reasons. What does it mean to wait for a long period of time? How do people narrate their waiting? Waiting is about the senses. If you do not sense it, there is no waiting. We sense waiting in the form of boredom, despair, anxiety and restlessness, but also anticipation and hope. Prolonged waiting is like insomnia - a state of wakefulness, a kind of mood, an emotional state. But it is also about politics; affecting and affected by gender, citizenship, class, and race. Blending ethnography, philosophy, poetry, art, and fiction, this book is a collection of works by scholars, visual artists, writers, architects and curators, exploring different forms of waiting in diverse geographical contexts, and the enduring effects of history, power, class, and coloniality.

Waiting territories in the Americas. Life in the Intervals of Migration and Urban Transit, 2016

Associating the notion of territory with the phenomenon of waiting may appear somewhat counterintuitive, since in common parlance one speaks of ‘waiting places’, not ‘waiting territories’. However, if we use the phrase ‘waiting territories’, it is precisely in order to avoid reducing the space and time of waiting to commonplace considerations. As a matter of fact, the notion of territory can make it possible to overcome the limits implied by the phrase ‘waiting places’, both at the physical level of the practices of those who dwell in these spaces, and at the intellectual level of the discourses on these concepts.

2013

Palimpsesto, 2023

This essay proposes an alternative theory for analysing social and human waiting that breaks with the prevailing temporal approach. I suggest relocating waiting as a subject of study from the area of temporalities to that of social institutions. My approach draws on the theory of institutions offered by Discontinuous Materialism1 (DM) to analyse waiting processes. I argue that this perspective overcomes the gnoseological problems that current temporal theories of waiting have in the material field of these phenomena. The essay analyses the categories and concepts related to DM, such as ϕ-components and πtotalities, anthropological space, and ceremony. It shows how they can be applied to waiting processes. This work also critiques two theoretical pillars on which current research is based: the idea that waiting is a fundamentally experiential and subjective phenomenon and the view that waiting constitutes ontologically negative (temporal) phenomena. The proposed institutional theory transforms waiting from a nebulous, liminal, and temporal phenomenon to one with materially visible and determinable contours. The essay concludes by demonstrating how the institutional character of waiting can further refine and delimit their specific field while also situating social and human waiting within a broad and diverse gnoseological field.

Waiting Territories in the Americas. Life in the Intervals of Migration and Urban Transit, Edited by Laurent Vidal and Alain Musset, 2016

Today, in what might be described as the second wave of thought on the "mobility turn", new approaches are emerging. In this perspective, waiting may be understood as intrinsic to societies in movement. Those who invoke the utopian notion of the "death of distance" fail to make into account the moment of interruption and the (temporal and spatial) constraint experienced by those who are waiting or displaced.