Time for tea

“We must make matter matter, not only in science but in society as well”

(Hekman, 2008:116)

As I look into the folds of practice where students are learning about/for Obstetrics, small matters that seem insignificant do become relevant, demonstrating material agency in their entanglements and inter-relationalities. One such example is the cup of tea/coffee.

Barad (2007:390) states that

“We are responsible for the world of which we are a part, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped”.

Near the start of my interest in this work, a student mentioned how special it was to be invited into the nurses’ tearoom for a cup of tea during her Obstetrics rotation. This action/intra-action seemed to break into/through disciplinary and power differences thereby enabling this student to feel welcomed into a space that was traditionally seen as a “no space” for students. Shared tea in a communal space became an affirmative action towards developing mutual responsibility in teaching and learning. There was a reconstitution of a boundary.

In a  learning brief produced by the Perinatal Mental Health Project, based in Cape Town, there is a recommendation for health workers to find time for tea and to “step outside for your tea break” as a self-care strategy.

But what happens when tea time and drinking tea/coffee has more force and power than the needs of women in labour? Barad (2007:390) calls for a posthumanist ethics in terms of responsibility which she asserts “is the ability to respond to the other”. To explore an understanding of the material-discursive practices that do occur in Obstetrics, the phenomenon of tea/coffee drinking can be helpful. Besides the establishment of social relations, there are detrimental consequences when the drinking of tea overrides the necessity to provide care when it is needed. The material arrangements in facilities seem to contribute to such choices when the dynamic interplay of the cup and the health worker takes preference and therefore  excludes other intra-actions, constituting “changing conditions of possibility of changing possibilities” (Barad 2007:179).

The image above (drawn on my iPad using the Draw App then Adobe Ideas) reflects Barad’s (2007:181) metaphor of the tree rings - “evocative of the sedimenting process of becoming”. The past is always present with us. What students witness and experience in their training continues to impact on their future practice as a doctor. The drawing also reminds me of contour paths representing the iterative process of becoming, with different gradients and intensities. Pickering (1995:113) points out that “the contours of material agency emerge only in practice”.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of

matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Hekman, S. J.. 2008. Constructing the Ballast: An ontology for feminism.  In S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman (Eds.), Material Feminisms (pp 85-119). Indiana University Press. Bloomington.

Perinatal Mental Health Project. 2013. Caring for health workers. Learning brief. http://pmhp.za.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Leaflet_HealthWorkers.pdf

Pickering, A. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. University of Chicago Press.