Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have turned their attention to the materiality of objects and buildings in order to examine what they make users do in practice. Taking a close look at a therapeutic community in a psychiatric day care center for teenagers, this paper joins these discussions by exploring the materiality of “spaces of care” as part of the center’s everyday practice. The analysis incorporates the concepts of scripts and dispositifs to describe the conditions of possibility in which caregivers and youths may position themselves in relation to others and to the space itself. This paper describes how spaces of care offer open, enticing, and variable conditions for fostering a dynamic of personal and relational responses as part of the care work. In this sense, the material environment entails potentialities in ways that are unpredictable but nonetheless consequential. Rather than arguing that material arrangements and things act, this paper draws attention to their impact via their potential within dispositifs of care that request participants’ attentiveness and responsiveness. Describing these potentialities brings out the subtler requirements of material environments in care practices that aim at circumventing the coercion of disciplinary spaces and their impersonal classifications.

In many countries the lockdown measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic forbade social gatherings, including for performing arts. Numerous artists developed projects, often attempting to reach audiences in cyberspace. We offer an ethnographic study of such a project: a jazz concert played live for a particular audience, who attended it from home. We seek to understand how musicians, audience, and the material setting made it possible to engage with music in a way that gave these moments a particular density. What made this experience meaningful, we argue, was the eventness of the performance: the ‘game was on’, happening in the moment, in the unpredictable, risky interactions between musicians, and with the ‘push of the audience’ listening to the gig in real time. The eventness of this online concert was created in such a way it made possible a collective engagement with and through live music, notwithstanding the physical distance.

No abstract

When I arrived in the field, Baptiste, the coordinator, told me an intriguing story about a change that had just occurred. On Monday mornings, the teens and a few caregivers gathered for a 'speaking group', where each teenager was invited to discuss an issue of current importance to them. Neither a psychotherapeutic group, in which participants were expected to expose their own difficulties, nor a meeting dedicated to the resolution of conflicts, the speaking group had been implemented by caregivers a few years earlier as they observed how uneasy it was for the adolescents to relate to each other as a group of peers. Hence it became important to create a space for casual discussions, fed by the adolescents' concerns only, for them to better constitute a group identity with its own significances. Since then, the speaking group had had its ups and downs. But in recent months, it had become a mess. Discussions gave rise to lots of tensions. Participants had become far more irritable. They didn't trust the confidentiality within the group anymore, to such a point that exchanges had turned idle or jammed.Until some teenagers proposed moving the speaking group to the living room. Originally, caregivers didn't want to do it there because they saw the living room as mostly the teens' space, and they didn't want to intrude in it. So far, the speaking group had taken place in a multipurpose room where they brought cushions and everyone sat in a circle. But, as some of the teens told me later, the living room appeared to them a better space for feeling at ease and connecting with each other. It was a material environment where they were used to engaging with the other

No abstract