Short Abstract

We invite critical reflections on the possibility of doing ethnography with uncertain or ambiguous sites and subjects of aging. We hope to challenge normative spaces of ethnography and the relationship between the where and who of research and the knowledge that emerges in hyper visible spaces.

Long Abstract

Dementia is in the long-term care home. It is on the 3rd floor behind locked doors. Somewhere else the doors are unlocked and because programming is for anyone, there’s no dementia. But dementia does not start in a care home or with a diagnosis, nor does aging start at a demographic threshold. Experiences and identities emerge through the vagaries of daily life. But in the ambiguous space of daily life, beyond specific infrastructures and diagnosed, or defined demographics, the ethnographer rarely treads. It seems that potential participants have not yet made themselves visible to the ethnographic gaze. Here, the certainty of an enclosed or disclosed subject position remains absent. Why is it that most research on dementia takes place in a long-term care home? Is it that it’s an easier place to find people? And what is the relationship between the straightforward visibility of participants and the knowledge these encounters produce?

We invite ethnographers to think about the possibilities of entering the field in the openness of daily life in the (un)enclosure of the public, or the (un)disclosure outside the diagnostic visibility of dementia. How do we create field relations and imagine and perform our research selves otherwise, beyond defined field sites and subjects? What are the challenges of gate-kept and administrated doorways? What are the possibilities for ethnographies of aging that don’t centralize a predefined way and place of becoming.

We hope to critically explore beyond a visible polarization of experience that precludes fieldwork. A specific diagnosis or not, a specific place or not. What if we think beyond these poles of site and experience to cultivate research relations amidst the ‘not-quite-sure’ of aging or memory loss. Who becomes an ethnographic subject and what’s possible when we centre not-yet visible encounters, beyond the polarity of one way or another.

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