23-24 June 2025, Tilburg, The Netherlands
The British Society for Phenomenology 2025 International Symposium
The Department of Philosophy and the Department of Culture Studies, University of Tilburg
Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis
https://www.thebsp.org.uk/2025/02/12/cfp-touching-time-duration-bodies-politics/
Sensing temporal interactions in enduring midlife love
Jasmine Bruce-Rogers
This paper proposes the everyday sensorial experiences of enduring midlife love as a site from which to access the overlapping temporalities of midlife, endurance, and embodiment, challenging the linearity of time through narrativisation practices in long-term relationships. These ideas concern my upcoming ethnographic fieldwork, and I consider the following a refined conceptual approach.
Critical reflexivity on life’s trajectory at midlife (see: Schmidt 2020; Infurna et al. 2020; Wray 2006) generates a sense of heightened temporality, where the present is stretched and suspended as individuals (re)visit their lives. Midlife reflections on enduring love, as both lasting and demanding, reveal how everyday moments compose the rhythms (see: Lefebvre 2004; Lyon 2019) of a relationship; interlocutor’s narratives of the relationship are formed through reverberations of these rhythms, echoing in response to present moments of reflection.
The narrativisation of a relationship over time demonstrates Baraitser’s discussion of memory as a dynamic force, whereby quotidian sensorial interactions reveal the past as a continuous process (2017). Conceptualising love as sensorial might see to how love is felt in the welcoming smell of a home-cooked meal, or how exhaustion characterises loving practices in the aching feet of the partner who shopped, prepared, and cooked the ingredients. The sensations of such situated moments might recall past promises of shared domestic labour, or conversations of deep appreciation, constantly rewriting the narrative of the relationship; for enduring relationships, the past may be richer, filled with more experiences to negotiate narratives. Through perpetual dialogue with an ever-present past, time folds over itself as relationships are done and re-done, endured over and through time.
How else might a sensorial approach to enduring midlife love inform reconceptualisations of normative temporalities? What might different collaborative ethnographic methods offer? This paper engages these questions by exploring the proposed mosaic of methods for my upcoming fieldwork; using four specified methods to observe, participate in, and collaborate with interlocutors’ daily lives over a 12-month period, I hope to tease out the temporal interactions of enduring midlife love.
Rhythms of Love 