Paper short abstract:

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.