I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia, revealing the ways in which the ethical subjects (including the researcher) emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavours.
Paper long abstract
How should anthropologists approach, perceive, and engage with everyday crises, such as sleep disturbance, without interrupting residents' privacy and day-to-day life in dementia care home? How can we allow medicalised bodies to be recognised as possibilities of subjects and possibilities of ethics, attending to their meaning-making actions and utterances? What should we do if we encounter situations where different traditions, ideas, and practices around what is morally/ethically good/right coexist and conflict with one another, or if the existing regulations, rules, and norms do not provide a sufficient resolution for an ethical dilemma? More directly, what should we do if a mother living with dementia asks us to call her daughter early one autumn morning in a care home? Building on a decade of voluntary work and a year's fieldwork (including six weeks' intensive observation of nightlife) in a Jewish care home in London, I pay attention to the affective dimension of ethical practice at the moment of sleep disturbance of a resident with dementia. Inspired by Heidegger's concept of dwelling, I understand the episode not as the pathological, but as a process through which the ethical subjects (including the researcher) emerge in the making of ongoing, entangled ethical endeavours.