Who gets to decide when something is over? How is declaring so an act of power? Professor of Global Health Ethics, Patricia Kingori, joins to discuss these questions and many more raised by the interdisciplinary ‘After the End’ project on which she’s the lead researcher. 

From ‘post-natal’ to ‘post-war’, we humans seem enamoured with the idea that complex things can be declared “over”. But - from long Covid to the persistence of supposedly long-eradicated diseases - what happens when we’re faced with lived experience that challenges such a simplification? Patricia reflects on this and more, including: what do we owe research participants, after a project has formally ended? And why, if we want to ensure “temporal justice”, should we consider actually asking “the people who are affected" whether they consider a thing to be “over”.

Plus: Patricia evokes her experience of time on St Kitts, where she grew up, and celebrates the time-bending movie ‘All of Us Strangers’. A boundary-breaking, continent-spanning conversation on health, inequality, conflict and time.

Guest: Patricia Kingori; Host: Rosie Hancock; Executive Producer: Alice Bloch; Sound Engineer: David Crackles; Music: Joe Gardiner; Artwork: Erin Aniker

Episode Resources

By Patricia Kingori and colleagues at the ‘After the End’ project

• Being the index-case
• The End and What Comes After
• Indigenous Time

From the Sociological Review Foundation

• Good vibrations: Why sociologists make ideal podcasters
• Listen to Ilana Gershon on Breakups

Further resources

• Sand Talk and Right Story, Wrong Story
• Feminist, Queer, Crip
• What the land can teach us
• Grenfell Tower fire and key findings of the Grenfell Inquiry’s final report
• On the standardisation of time
• Debora Deniz
• Patricia Daley
• Against Time
• In a Queer Time and Place
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• All of Us Strangers
• Dora Vargha and her Polio Across the Iron Curtain

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