Jessica Hardin

JESSICA HARDIN, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2021 to aid research on “Time, Timescale and Responsibility: Care Decision Making for Diabetes Complications in Samoa.” This project centered on understanding how cultural notions of time and timescale shape care decisions, using diabetes related complications to question how temporal patterns influence health trajectories in Samoa. Support received was critical to transforming this individual, traditional solo-ethnography, into a collaborative project that privileged team ethnography through methodological experimentation and trust-building exercises. The project focused on three primary questions: How do communities track changes in the bodies of its members? How do people articulate responsibility in temporal ways? What are the social consequences of sharing of this information? Funds supported the training of nursing faculty at the National University of Samoa in ethnographic methods and Pacific Research Methodologies; the collection of 31 ethnographic interviews; a dialogue event between nursing faculty and traditional healers; the transcription and translation of ethnographic interviews; the regular meetings of the team for analysis and research planning. Preliminary findings suggest that individuals defer to others to keep track of their healing progress. The team found that people kept track of time by chronicling the various responsibilities and commitments they were not able to maintain.