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Japanese care centers have seen an increasing reliance on robotic assistance in service and social-care tasks, which poses questions about ethics, governance, and caregiving practices. This presentation addresses the concept of robotics as a media technology, and the role of human agency in shaping imagination as an interpretive framework as it reflects on two specific points of debate; (1) whether the humanoid robot Pepper, deployed in an elder-care nursing home in Japan, has some form of agency in its interaction with a nursing home resident; and (2) whether appropriate anthropological debates about being (properly reframed with regard to difference) provide insight into the reality of robot care. Adapting an approach by anthropologist Tom Boellstorff (2016), whose work focuses on the reality of virtual worlds, this presentation analyzes whether questions regarding the real of robot care are questions of being, i.e. of ontology. Conflating the interhuman with the real and the robotic with the unreal—or, in this case, conflating human care with the real (authentic) and robot care with the unreal (artificial)—can negatively affect our ability to discuss the reality of the robotic. The ontological turn can yield important insights, but its potential is lost if what is real is preassigned to the physical.
This presentation offers a close study of the interracial and intergenerational dynamics that unfold in long-term care for older adults. It offers focused insights from a singular small-town South African nursing home in comparative perspective to the rest of the country and the US by examining the life stories and interactions among the home’s older mostly white residents and the younger black nurses who care for them. This presentation draws from the author’s new creative and narrative nonfiction book, God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End (Rutgers and Wits University Presses) based on years of immersive ethnographic research and narrated as a one-day, room-by-room tour of the home. Seven residents and staff members’ life stories—including the untold story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island Prison nurse—highlight the tensions between care and prejudice, survival and memory, as they reckon with the haunting legacy of apartheid, a system of racially segregationist policies that forever wounded South Africa and created the unequal socioeconomic conditions the country still beholds today despite apartheid’s end thirty years ago. Through these stories, we learn how ageism, sexism, and racism intersect and impact care as well as create conditions in which people primed to be enemies find grace despite the odds.
Care homes are essentially social spaces. When it comes to care homes for the elderly with dementia, the residents have different limits and needs, which often clash with the limits and needs of others. As an institution, care home facilitates the social life of the residents on several levels. Management decides on how residents are distributed to their rooms, care workers meet their needs and also resolve conflicts in daily life of the care home. However, it is not only the nursing home that facilitates interactions between seniors, but they also have to get along with each other in daily life. When doing my fieldwork in two different care homes catering to the German-speaking elderly, I practiced something that I later called “common room ethnography”. Most of time in the care homes I spent sitting in the common rooms that was a centre of daily life of both care homes. Often asked by the care workers to keep an eye on the residents while care workers pursued their duties outside the common room. This allowed me to observe the social interactions between the residents but also interact with them myself, despite the fact that we did not share a common language. In the presentation, I would like to think about how rules, organization as well as space arrangement and material objects create a space where daily social life of the elderly take place and therefore how the institutional setup shape the social life of the residents of the care homes for the elderly.
Catering to the needs of older adults broadly defined as ‘Indisch’, most of them born and raised in the colonial Dutch East Indies, so-called ‘Indisch’ nursing homes in The Netherlands have a long and colonially inflected history. While a personal, biographical tie to the Dutch East Indies determines access to what is now called ‘culturally specific’ eldercare, since a few years, eligibility for residential long-term care is also predicated upon a medical indication, which has significantly altered the social fabric of the home. Grounded in ethnographic research in an Indisch nursing home in a middle-sized Dutch town and centered around collective meals taken in the nursing home’s restaurant, this presentation zooms in on ‘the past’ as source of sociality and division, and explores tensions but also friendships and conviviality as they emerge in daily encounters between residents spending the end of their lives under one roof. Ultimately, the presentation argues that the Indisch nursing home can serve as an entry point to explore the afterlives of colonialism in contemporary Dutch society.
Sociality is fundamental to the human condition, shaping the ability of individuals to form societies through reciprocal interactions. Among the many ways in which human beings interact, sociability is, according to Simmel, the “play-form of association”, that is, a form of interacting with others for the pure sake of association. Nursing homes for people with dementia do not explicitly seek to promote the pleasure of being together: the satisfaction of basic needs (sleeping, washing, dressing, eating and enjoying leisure activities), in accordance with autonomy, dignity, well-being and security, are the official objectives they have to fulfil. This does not prevent nursing homes from actively foster sociality; the social scaffolding role they play can even lead to moments of sociability. However, the forms of cooperation proper to people with dementia are unusual and unpredictable, and getting people with dementia to interact cannot be taken for granted. Therefore, the existence of social interactions in such institutional settings requires planned, conscious and deliberate efforts on the part of professionals. Based on an ethnographic inquiry in two nursing homes in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, our paper examines how maintaining sociality in these places is an integral part of caring for people with dementia, how the elaboration of interaction situations reflects different conceptions of good care, and how sociability can be used as a resource for caring. To this end, nursing homes are understood as “assemblages” of ideas, bodies, utterances, human and non-human entities, spaces and environments of various kinds. Combined with an emic perspective, this approach will ultimately inform us about the types of social relationships that nursing homes encourage and promote, and about the professional views of what are desirable and legitimate social relationships for people with dementia.
Based on our current ethnographic research in Swiss Nursing Homes in the frame of the SNFS funded project ‘Caring about Diversities’ (2021-2025), we will explore the issue of ‘good care’ as practiced by staff in the shared social environment of the nursing home. We will apply the concept of ‘crafting practices’ to explore how nurses craft specific ways to optimize provision of ‘good care’ for residents (with dementia), creating tailored strategies based on competences, embodiment and creativity. We coin the term ‘crafting practices’ to refer to applying specific formal or informal competences to a specific practical situation emanating from interactions between nursing staff and residents. We focus particularly on the available crafting space (team structures/culture) and crafting tools (staffing, competences or skills, ideas), or the lack thereof, and how they support or obstruct ‘good care’ for NHresidents. We aim at illuminating the way nurses enact professional agency while preserving personal agency of residents within a shared social context.
Though the Activity Provider is a common role in care homes globally, to date there is very little research on the role and the impact it has on the sociality of care home spaces. This paper uses one and a half years of ethnographic and participatory research on UK Activity Providers to consider how the Activity Provider role shapes social relations amongst care home staff and residents and reflects larger social inequalities and differences in the UK social care landscape. I will begin this talk with a brief genealogy of the Activity Provider role and then introduce three main findings from my research to date. First, I will discuss how the Activity Provider role has introduced a division of care labor in care homes, where Activity Providers become responsible for ‘fun,’ ‘social’ care and carers for ‘dirty,’ ‘bodily’ care, resulting in staff tensions. Second, I will examine critiques of Activity Provider-facilitated activities as ‘infantilizing,’ ‘silly’ and ‘mere time-fillers,’ and reflect more broadly on debates around what counts as meaningful activity in care homes and for whom. Third, I will dwell on the uneven distribution of the Activity Provider role across the UK care home landscape and consider whether and how the Activity Provider role serves as an emblem of unequal, austerity-laden social care in the UK. I conclude by arguing that the Activity Provider role raises bigger questions for anthropology about the opportunities and limits of ‘designed sociality.’
Drawing on ethnographic material collected during fieldwork in two nursing homes in Switzerland, I will address the question of how “home” is created in nursing homes in relation to the institutional goal of providing services and enabling participation. In the efforts of staff to create a home for residents, residents are often seen as passive but autonomous consumers who should enjoy their new home - not work for it. At the same time, residents display a range of strategies for navigating the often involuntary transition to residential care. These include taking an active interest in what goes on in the institution and attempting to support everyday processes by making small adjustments. I will argue that these small practices are a relevant moment of appropriation, central to a sense of being at home that works precisely because it resists the ideal of the passive, voluntary and autonomous client.
It is often assumed that home-making practices help people with dementia experience a sense of belonging in care homes, rather than indulging in endless nostalgia. However, based on research at a dementia care home in urban China, I explore how people with dementia use their previous embodied experience of the Danwei system to develop an unintended sense of place in the care home. The Danwei system was how China organized its cities during the planned economy period (1949-1978), in which workers worked and received welfare benefits such as housing, education and healthcare. In this case, by viewing residents’ narrative of "Danwei" as an embodied experience, I argue that the Danwei as a manifestation of socialist Guojia (the nation) creates a sense of place for people with dementia on a national scale when Jia (the individual home) disappears on the personal scale.
