Time with houseplants: A sociological analysis of temporalities, affective entanglements and practices of care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to a sociology of time and rhythm as well as a sociology of human–plant relations. It argues that sociology should take an interest in houseplants because studying human-plant relations in the domestic sphere offers novel possibilities for exploring wider sociological themes such as multispecies interactions, intimacy and identity as well as time and everyday life. The article analyses houseplant care practices and their significance for (re)shaping everyday rhythms and routines during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we discuss plant care as re-making time in lockdown during which new rhythms emerge and plants themselves become temporal devices which structure everyday life. Second, we discuss how affective human–houseplant bonds resulting from routine care-practices lead to a new feeling for time that materialised as an intensification of the present. In the final part, we position our empirical data within the broader literature on the transformative potential of everyday life. This leads us to explore plant care as the making of new habits and routines that can reshape our understanding of the present and future. Overall, this article shows how the practices of domestic plant care in lockdown including recognition of the temporalities and rhythms of the plants themselves reshaped the experience of time of our respondents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".