Publications
📻 Listen to the podcast ‘In Honour of Matters of Time’ via the link below.
In this research, we aim to explore the conditions and implications of the subtle, everyday configurations that influence the definition of temporalities in healthcare. Below, we share some of the project’s findings.
Opening the black box of time in healthcare: an analysis of time organisation by object in Chile
Magazine
Health and Society
Year
2024
Country
Brazil
Download
SciELO
Status
Published
Available in
Web of Science
Summary.
This study explores the social and material processes involved in the organisation of time in the development of policies and clinical practice. Drawing on an analysis of material gathered during a case study centred on ethnographies and interviews concerning the Chilean healthcare system – specifically the Explicit Health Guarantees scheme – we examine how the interplay between social activities and objects shapes the temporal dimension within the healthcare sector. We analyse this by specifically considering the role of indices and statistics in their biopolitical dimension and the local role of contingent and regular arrangements in clinical practice. We conclude with some implications for the integration of a socio-material approach to understanding time in healthcare.
This article highlights how temporal orders arise from the interrelationships between heterogeneous and, at times, mundane elements, and examines two implications of this. Firstly, the idea that socio-material temporal orders constitute the basis for, and shape, any general or specific relationship between health and illness. In biopolitical terms, it is the configuration of an emerging temporality that enables biological processes to be inscribed within the reflection of population-level processes. Biopolitics itself consists—among other things—of technical objects (such as indices, statistics or evidence) that acquire meaning through their relationship with time, as they construct it in a specific way.
Secondly, we consider it important to address temporality in healthcare as a matter of concern, not only in terms of the need to speed up and optimise processes for the provision of healthcare services, but also because its very configuration, in its many forms, arises from the involvement of actors who shape it subtly and with dedication within healthcare settings. The organisation of time is an endeavour by human and non-human entities to shape multiple flows that coexist and influence one another. Furthermore, biological temporality depends on socio-material articulations, and local agencies influence time; this implies the multiple ways in which time can be practised and valued by different agents or collectives, putting it into operation in different ways. The ways in which the variable and shared expressions of time are organised will depend on the sensitivity of the epistemic operations involved in shaping them in the face of this heterogeneity.
Five transitions in algorithmic governance within the composition of medical temporality
Magazine
Psychological Perspectives
Year
2025
Country
Chile
Download
SciELO
Status
Published
Available in
Scopus
Summary.
Artificial Intelligence has permeated numerous social contexts, and medicine is no exception. It forms part of the recent hopes being articulated to address issues linked to the temporal nature of routine medical practices. In this paper, we analyse five transformations that Artificial Intelligence brings to the organisation of medical temporality, considering how this relates to changes in the dynamics of power shaped by the notion of algorithmic governmentality. To this end, we draw on a study of the healthcare system in Chile, which involves the development of a multi-sited ethnography based on ministerial contexts and public and private clinical care settings. We have gathered data through focused ethnographies, news analysis and in-depth interviews with experts and professionals, and have structured the findings using abductive analysis. The five transitions described take into account the algorithmic, iterative, itinerant, interstitial and organismic nature of the temporality constituted by scenarios in which Artificial Intelligence plays a part. We conclude by highlighting the link between these transformations and the understanding of algorithmic governmentality within the medical sphere.
Excerpts from pages.
In this paper, we have explored the emergence of what we conceive as five shifts or patterns relating to the incorporation of AI into time management dynamics in healthcare. Whilst AI functions as a resource geared towards the organisation of time, by accelerating routine analytical processes, its implications reveal dynamics that affect and redefine the very notion of time and, with it, of power. Within this logic, power does not operate upon aggregates of subjects encapsulated within the idea of a population—who follow their own distinct temporal courses—but rather links together far more heterogeneous networks that do not distinguish between traits, people and things. AI generates ambiguous dynamics in which the traditional fluctuations and speeds between the analogue and the digital are diluted within its organismic configurations, which bring the digital closer to analogue human rationalities, thereby serving as a source for its calculations and iterations. Likewise, any ‘analogue’ activity can be interpreted in digital terms and then translated into an action or activity in the social (‘analogue’) world. As Hälterlein (2021) points out, algorithms are not constructed according to a specific ontological perspective, but rather as a result of data analysis based on patterns and associations. Based on their iterations and tests, their results are only relevant in terms of their descriptive or predictive approximation of the scenarios in which they operate, which in turn serve as input for their construction.
Within this governmental dynamic, human bodies are configured as vectors of disease, infection and illness, which are distributed across an infinite number of parts (O’Byrne & Holmes, 2009). In this way, the subject is no longer the ultimate object of analysis, but rather their relationships, habitats and routines. As undifferentiated elements within networks of associations, the particularised traits of subjects (their ‘dividual’ formations, as opposed to ‘individual’ ones (Deleuze, 2006)) are continually modulated on the basis of their connection to the indeterminate conditions made possible by the scope of AI’s computational power. As a fundamental feature of algorithmic governmentality and its temporal organisation, this modulation is significant not only for the effects and hopes it raises regarding the redefinition of the flows through which healthcare is practised, but also for the indefinite scope of its operations and the ways in which our multiple temporal partialities are assessed in its iterations.
Artificial Intelligence is not only playing a part in reshaping what is beginning to be understood as knowledge in medical contexts, but also in the dynamics through which its temporal processes are shaped. Thus, it can be argued that we are moving from an understanding of a linear temporal logic – usually present in conventional administrative dynamics – to an organismic one, which operates as a complex network with diverse, relatively interconnected and mutually responsive potentials for renewal.
We must take care of time: sensitive trajectories of time in Matters of Time
Book
Timescapes of Health, Illness and Care
Year
2025
Country
Singapore (Palgrave Macmillan)
Download
(Preprint)
Status
Published
Available in
Springer Nature
Summary.
This chapter develops the argument that, in healthcare, time is neither a neutral backdrop nor an objective fact that simply ‘is there’, but rather a fragile, situated and labour-intensive construction. Contrary to the modern, medical view that treats time as linear, external and homogeneous, the text proposes understanding temporality as the effect of the interplay between multiple heterogeneous elements: protocols, technologies, bodies, domestic routines, databases, clinical criteria, political decisions, infrastructure and affect. In this sense, time does not precede action: it emerges from it
This chapter explores the socio-material composition of temporality in healthcare, emphasising how time is shaped through the interaction between social, technical and material elements. By challenging the dominant view of time as a linear and external measure, the concept of ‘sensitive trajectories’ is introduced, which frames temporality as a relational and emergent product of everyday healthcare practices. This approach, inspired by Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of a ‘question of care’, suggests that the alignment of temporalities in healthcare is fragile and requires effort. Drawing on a case study of the most recent major healthcare reform in the Chilean health system—the Explicit Health Guarantees scheme—and on material generated primarily through focused ethnographies, the text illustrates how various entities and practices—such as patients, healthcare professionals, meetings, and non-human agents such as databases and emails—subtly shape different temporal flows in the design of health policies and within clinical settings, revealing the precarious nature of these temporal alignments, which are constantly threatened by disruptions and require ongoing maintenance. By positioning time as an active agent shaped by these relationships, we highlight the need to attend to temporality in healthcare, presenting time as a fragile, co-produced phenomenon that emerges from the everyday work of assembling heterogeneous elements.
Artificial intelligence and real-time data in healthcare: challenges for a sociology of time, temporalities and temporalisation
Magazine
Spanish Journal of Sociology (RES)
Year
2026
Country
Spain
Download
RES
Status
Published
Available in
Web of Science
Summary.
This article examines how the notion of ‘real-time’ in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application in healthcare settings poses new challenges for a sociology of time, temporality and temporalisation. Drawing on a review of specialist literature and fieldwork — which includes interviews and documentary analysis in the context of a study on time in Chile’s healthcare systems — the article identifies the different meanings that ‘real time’ takes on in AI innovations. Its configurations are critically analysed in terms of immediacy, timeliness, continuous monitoring, predictability and profit maximisation, demonstrating how these reconfigure clinical practices, hospital management and the experience of time within healthcare services. Finally, the theoretical and methodological challenges that these processes pose for the social studies of time are discussed.
What it’s about
The article explores how the concept of ‘real time’ – central to the development of artificial intelligence – is applied within healthcare services and reshapes the experience and management of time. Drawing on a review of the literature and fieldwork within the Chilean healthcare system (interviews and documentary analysis), the authors demonstrate that ‘real time’ is not a singular concept: it takes on various meanings (immediacy, timeliness, continuous monitoring, predictability and profit maximisation) that operate at different levels, ranging from immediate clinical decision-making to hospital management and the economic logic of return on investment.
Using specific examples (real-time hospital management platforms and patient traceability software, such as cancer monitoring systems), the study demonstrates how these temporal configurations shape clinical practices and power relations. Finally, it proposes an analytical framework (the macro/meso/micro layers of real-time in healthcare) and discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges that these systems pose for a sociology of time, temporalities and temporalisation.
Figure 1. Layers and real-time assemblies in healthcare. Source: own work (from the article).
Figure 2. Sociological and real-time analysis in Industry 4.0. Source: compiled by the author (from the article).