Program

In this symposium of the MAS (Medical Anthropology Switzerland), we want to explore how sociality, friendship and belonging are constituted in residential long-term care and thereby challenge the representation of nursing homes as ‘cold’ institutional spaces, in contrast to a romanticized idea of ‘warm’ familial care. As spaces of daily, intimate coexistence, nursing homes are quintessentially social spaces – they are at once home to their residents, workplace to various professionals and volunteers, but also sites of visiting relatives, friends and neighbours.

Bringing together various ethnographically informed contributions, this symposium will explore the ways in which sociality is imagined, enabled, practiced, experienced but also regulated in residential long-term care. Who is participating in designing sociality in the nursing home? How is sociality related to care? How are inclusion, exclusion and belonging mediated in these spaces of coexistence? What are the genealogies of the ways in which ‘sociality’ has been imagined in residential long-term care, and what are its futures, especially as the idea of ‘ageing in place’ is increasingly defining eldercare policies?