Alya Guseva (BU Sociology)

"The Limits of 'Fast' Care: Time Compression in Commercial Surrogacy and Public Healthcare Provision"

with Alaz Kilicaslan, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

Based on interviews with surrogacy providers in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia, and physicians in Turkey’s performance-based payment system, we examine what both groups refer to as “fast care” (alternatively fast surrogacy or fast health) – a system of care delivery that is based on compressing time and prioritizes efficiency. In both of these (very different) settings, providers use industrial metaphors to describe it, and the moralized language to distinguish “fast care” that is corrupt and degraded from what care ought to be. We explore the notion of plurotemporalism – the tension between the different modes and experience of time, and link time compression to “scaling up”.